I have had some good time now (2 weeks) messing around with Google plus and The amazing site that finally came over to American shores, Spotify.
As I was writing this post up a friend of mine, Randy Elrod, posted his thoughts on how these to sites are creating culture. I want to go through a few of my thoughts on these two sites and possibly shed light on them for those who have not been on the sites yet, those who are new to them, and those who still need to buy a computer.
Let me work backwards and say this first. If you are one of those people who are still holding on with unshakable pride to the fact that you don’t own a computer, don’t own a cellphone, maybe still use aol.com or have a hotmail email is your main one. Culture is moving ahead even if you don’t. You can choose to engage and jump in head first. Relationships are built in many different ways these days.
I want to call these places watering holes. Facebook, twitter, spotify, google plus are the modern day watering holes. They are places we can come together and meet with our “circles” of friends, acquaintances, family, and even meet new people. Social media is where we do life now. These watering holes feed my soul. They teach me how to be a better father, husband, worship leader, creative and more.
Facebook over the years has been great at accomplishing my needs, but it was missing a bunch of features I really wanted.
Google plus does it better.
Google plus added Circles. It lets me create small groupings of personal watering holes. I have full control over who I want to speak to and who I am willing to reveal things to. Circles also make it so I have full control over who I feel like listening to at the time. Those two features along make it 1000 times more intuitive and useful than facebook.
Google plus currently does not have the abilty to create vanity domains like facebook does, but there are workarounds like the site http://gplus.to/. As a matter of fact you can find me through my vanity domain http://gplus.to/klampert.
There are so many more features that make Google plus the ideal site including the fact that it is still beta so it will be improving based on what people like you and I say. I don’t want to flood the internet with more pages explaining the features because you can find everything and everything about how to work it. Let me just say it is fantastic, it is what’s next, and you NEED to be on it.
I have been on Pandora and Grooveshark for years!! I am not only a fan of both sites, but also spread the word about them.
Spotify does it better
I got my spotify invite and immediately jumped in. Unlike Pandora it does not repeat songs unless I want it to and it doesn’t play things I didn’t ask it to. Unlike Grooveshark it has 98% of everything you could ever want or need.
With all the new announcements of all the cloud services like icloud, amazon and google I wondered where spotify would fit in.
For $10 a month I can have unlimited streaming desktop and mobile of anything and everything including all of my own music! What is amazing about that is it will even play up to 3000 songs OFFLINE!
Let me break this down for you very simply. $10 a month could possibly eliminate the need for itunes and buying CD’s entirely.
All in all these two sites dropping in the last weeks are like Christmas for people like me. Jump in to the new watering holes!! The water is fine!
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