If you’re a Google Plus user you have definitely seen the new changes: Menu to the left with nice big-ish buttons; Content also left, almost squished and leaves a bunch of whitespace to the right; big *cough* Facebook-like cover image. In general a much nicer and cleaner appearance, which for some reason makes me want to hang around a bit longer. I mostly use Google Plus for Google Pages of which I have about five. It gives me a place to follow exactly what I’M doing on my most important blogs. It might seem a bit weird, but for some reason it works.

So in that sense G+ has become a niche service for me… I follow myself. On top of that I get to follow all the latest geek-spittle, without the unnecessary noise of “this is my baby burping” Facebook and “follow this link here to read the comment” Twitter. I love reading comments and on a less noisy service like G+ I don’t actually have to sift through a few hundred to get to the good ones, it seems to always just be there. It might just be that I’m following the right people.

So far it’s only been positive, but like most other services G+ isn’t short of shortcomings… or should I rather say, “things I would like”.

In ul format:

Apps – After a few hours of Google Plus surfing it tends to get a tad boring. Even though the plethora of apps noisying up my Facebook dash is a constant irritation, it’s something that’s missing on G+. ( Not sure what the status is on this).

Tie-Inns – This was previously mentioned on SearchEngineLand and is still something that’s missing in the new version.

Complexity – Even though the multitude of privacy and other settings on Google Plus is what previously made so many people want to use it,  it’s still too complex for the average internet user.

This is in no way a comprehensive article and leaves out much of the other goods and bads of the latest version of Google Plus, but hopefully you can fill that in by dropping a few comments.