With the help of a buddy named Sid Narayananananan, I managed to get myself onto Google+ yesterday.

We originally tried the invite trick where apparently you can force Google+ to let people in by tagging their email addresses in posts. That ended up not working because I never got the email notification.

Then, I just randomly went to http://plus.google.com and signed up as if I was eligible to sign up as a beta user all along.

I played around with Google+ for quite a while, and I would have to say that it’s probably the best social network I’ve used so far (even though it’s still in beta mode). I’m sure I’ve explained this way too many times, but I don’t like Facebook because I don’t like dealing with the annoying who somehow end up on my friends list and interfere with things I would like to keep personal or private among my friends.

That’s why I initially switched over to Twitter – I no longer had to worry about people bothering me or leaving unwanted stuff on my timeline, because I’m the only one who can post stuff to my timeline. But obviously, Twitter lacks the personal touch that Facebook might offer.

Google+ has the best of both Facebook and Twitter. It’s easy to determine how much you want to share with whom. You add the people you know to circles – family members in “Family,” close friends in “Friends,” and general people you know in “Acquaintances.” Have something you only want your family to see? Select the “Family” circle when sharing. Have something you only want people you know to see? Select the “Family,” “Friends,” and “Acquaintances” circle. Have something you want the whole world to see? Select the “Public” option and even people who don’t have Google+ accounts will be able to see it on your feed. The best part is that you can create and remove circles at will so you can find the perfect balance of information sharing.

Do you want to share something but don’t want feedback on it? Something that’s clearly annoying on Facebook is when you post something and it ends up becoming a medium for random people to argue with each other. If you happen to post something that would not prompt any productive feedback, just disable commenting and nobody will be able to voice their (unwanted) opinion on your post.

Which brings me to my next point, no more random people writing stuff on your feed! If someone wants to tell you something, they can click on the “email” button and they’ll be able to use their GMail account to send an email to your GMail account all from inside Google+. That way, the only comments that show up on your feed will only be (or at least, should only be) relevant to the things that you choose to post on your feed. With Google+, there’s no more instances where someone posts something unwanted or too private on your feed and it ends up sitting there for a long time for the whole world to see before you manage to get on and delete it.

Even better, no more “Happy Birthday!” posts. In the past, I’ve considered turning off my Facebook wall on my birthday so people would stop telling me “Happy Birthday” on my wall. (My wall is off completely now, for those of you who are wondering.) Sure, it’s great that you care, but if you really actually care, you wouldn’t contribute in the mass spamming of my Facebook wall. Right before I stopped using Facebook, I had almost a thousand friends. It’s not pleasant to log in to your Facebook account and have a couple hundred notifications of a couple hundred new wall posts all telling you the exact same thing.

Speaking of notifications, you have probably commented on a popular person’s status or photo before and ended up getting notifications for every single person that comments after you for the rest of eternity. Google+ has an easy way to avoid that. If you comment on something and you realize that none of the following comments are replies directed at your comment, you can simply mute the conversation so you don’t have to be flooded with notifications.

All photos are taken care of with Picasa Web. It’s prob­ably not that important for the people who have never used Picasa Web before, but I’ve been using it for a long time now, and I got excited when I realized that all of my old albums were automatically imported to my profile. Even the same privacy settings were carried over, so my public albums are still accessible by the public, and my private albums are still only accessible by me. One dis­advantage of having Google+ linked with Picasa Web is that it ends up creating a handful of garbage albums in your account. If you’re like me, you like everything or­ganized and neat, and it’s not possible to organize these Google+-specific albums because they have protected properties. Hopefully that’s something Google will change before the public release.

Also, the videos feature is not associated with YouTube. I haven’t posted any videos yet, but it seems like if you upload them, they end up on your Picasa account and are accessible through Google+ and Picasa only. It appears from people in my circle that the video function might not be working overall, but that might just be because the person in question just did something wrong. If you watch any of my videos, you know that I post literally all my public videos on YouTube, so it would be helpful if YouTube was integrated into Google+. It probably won’t be very difficult either, seeing as Google owns YouTube.

Another suggestion I have is the integration of Google Music into Google+. In Facebook, there’s a third-party application called iLike where it shows the music you like and frequently listen to. There’s also a website called Last.fm that keep tracks of your favorite songs and how often you play each song. It would be awesome if there was a Music tab that had a similar function and allowed you to share that information with your friends directly from your profile.

This is pretty much all I’ve managed to do on Google+ so far, but I’ll definitely be playing around with it more in the near future, and if Google releases any large updates to Google+, I’ll blog about it and possibly include some screenshots for those of you who are not yet on Google+.