Google+ and the Cosmic Panda

I'm one of these people who loves new tech. From the new iPhone to the redesign of Facebook, I'm all for trying out new features on a phone or new ways to improve social networking. So you'd imagine my excitement when I heard about Google Plus, as well as YouTube's Cosmic Panda.

Google Plus is essentially Google's attempt to do Facebook but better. Cosmic Panda is YouTube's new interface for watching videos and view channels.

While I wasn't able to get into the initial beta of Google Plus, I got in once they opened it to all people who had a Google account. I've had one for years now so that made things pretty easy. When inside I dove right into figuring everything out. I know a lot of people were having trouble in the beginning, but I'd read a lot of initial impressions on Google Plus so I wasn't completely blind.

The main page view of Google Plus.

The most interesting thing about Google Plus so far is the circles feature. The feature is designed so you can separate who sees what whenever you post. For example, I have a circle that separates my friends where I live from my friends on IGN. Maybe I want to post about something that only the IGN folk will understand and vice-versa. There's also the option to just post into the open space of the internet if I wanted to.

Adding people to your Circles is simple.

It's really nice to have this option because I don't have to worry about saying something that may not be understood properly or may not have anything to do with certain people. I now know exactly who is going to see it, so makes creating conversations a lot easier.

Other circles, such as "following" are more like twitter. They help you follow celebrities in the same way that twitter or a fan page on Facebook does. All in all it's a handy feature that's nice to have.

The other two big features of Google Plus are the Sparks and Hangouts. The Sparks page acts exactly like fan pages on Facebook, but for much broader topics. They have things like "movies" and "recipes" on there. It's neat, but I see about as much use for it as I did on Facebook: none. The other problem is that the Sparks is a separate stream all together. While this is nice because it stops the main stream from getting cluttered, I'm not going to actively search out what's new under "movies".

Sparks, while easy to find, are too broad to be interesting.

The last feature, Hangouts, is something I've been unable to try just yet. From the impressions I've read though, it's a worthwhile feature and works much better than Facebook's attempt at Skype integration.

Of course since this is beta, so things don't work exactly as they should just yet. Sometimes when you make changes to your profile, the changes won't stick at first. The same applies to when you add new people to circles. Sometimes the system won't recognize that you've added them and you have to relogin before they appear.

Overall I've been really enjoying my time on Google Plus so far. I currently have less than fifty people between all of my circles, but the small number doesn't bother me. Right now Google Plus is clean and easy to sort through. There's also the lack of a lot of people I wish I hadn't added on Facebook.
Now it's the Cosmic Panda's turn. This is YouTube's new way to view videos and channels. If you look on the main page of YouTube, practically nothing looks different. That's about the only thing that looks the same though. Once you open up a new video screen, everything's changed.

YouTube's new way to view videos.

As you can see from the pic, the view area is more centered now. Everything is a lot less cluttered around the video itself. The only annoying thing is the ad on the side of the video, but going to the third screen size pushes it away. You'll notice the sidebar has the playlists and similar videos list like it did last time, but formatted much neater than before. You get a larger preview of the video instead of a small thumbnail that's impossible to see.

The channels themselves have been cleared up as well. There are now three different templates you can choose from that have separate formatting options depending on what videos you make. There's also a fourth that combines the three. The one you see below is the "Creator" template.

The "creator" template is one of three new ways to have people view your YouTube channel.

You'll notice that the videos are easily displayed, with the playlists below. The right side now has all the bio information and the tabs up top clear up all the subscribers and comments you don't really care to see.

While I'm enjoying the new format so far, I still think the ads right next to the video is obnoxious since most videos have an ad before them already. There's also an annoying side effect where if you click the "like" button while the video is in a larger view format, it goes back to the smaller. It's a bit frustrating, but hopefully that will be corrected when the full update rolls out.

So what about you guys? Have you enjoyed Google Plus? Are you enjoying it? What about YouTube's Cosmic Panda? Do you think this update is better for all of YouTube? Let me know in the comments!

Also, if you've got Google Plus, find me on there! Peter Freeman is where you can find me.