I’m really impressed with the launch of Google+. Given the number of people internally @ Google who’ve been dogfooding this, it’s equally impressive that it was kept under wraps for this long.

After using Google+ for a few days – wanted to jot down some early impressions:

• Having the new toolbar across all Google services is a huge deal. Whatever I’m doing during the day, good chance I’m on some Google property at one point, and seeing that little red notification box for Google+ is likely to draw me in for a few minutes.
• Email notifications were defaulted to on – and while I’ve since turned most of them off — the initial flood of emails that I’m sure everyone saw with people getting added to ‘Circles’ – gave the service that feel that everyone is joining up. Totally opposite from the Buzz launch, where everything was just ‘on’ day one.
• One problem I’m having though, is that I don’t recognize a big chunk of people that are adding me — similar to the Twitter followers for most people I would guess. Would be nice to have the Google People widget (or for bonus points Rapportive) integrated somehow (or simply on hover) to get a 360 snapshot of who these people are.
• I’m a google apps (for your domain) power user. As best I can tell, Google Apps users have been excluded from the initial Google+ rollout, so I’ve been using my google account/gmail account. I’m hoping that’s the right decision, and that I won’t need to redo everything I’ve done so far with my Google Apps account at some point.
• Related to the apps account — on Android, the Google+ app doesn’t find my gmail account — keeps trying my main google apps/domain account.
• I tested uploading a photo, and it forced me to also create an album — found that a bit odd
• How do I push my WordPress posts to Google+ ?  I’m guessing that’s coming soon when the APIs are unveiled – but would have been nice to see an easy way to do that day 1 – or maybe I missed it ?

Overall: I think Google+ is a product that is going to gain some meaningful market share — and quickly. They’ve seemingly taken all the criticisms of the other services and addressed them – especially with Circles. And now we’ll see how all the services will compete head-to-head.  One thing’s for sure, it’s great to see some competitions and innovation in this space and Google deserves huge credit (at least so far) for keeping at it, and not letting Buzz, Wave, and a few other launches deter them from tackling this space – i.e. a good lesson at not listening to your detractors, and just keeping your head down and working on good products.