The gold rush is on. There is a new wild west and it is the land of Google +.

I have written, at length, on how picky I am about whom I let follow me on Twitter.  I block about 50% of the people who try to follow me, because, they are not serious in wanting to connect with me.  They just want a big follower count.  If I have said it once, I have said it 853 times; huge follow counts just don’t matter.

Follower/Circled Count

So today I woke up and found that my ‘people who’ve added you’ (to circles) was up to 42. Woot!  I love it!  There was a little dance (with a nod to Snoopy) and I felt a great sense of ‘Follower’ pride.  I have 1609 followers on Twitter and don’t celebrate with each additional 100, because I know it isn’t the quantity, but the quality.  So why am I so different on G+?

Because this is the absolute bleeding edge of this new platform and one can feel confident that only the most hardened Social Media nut jobs (read geeks [read me]) are swimming around this new pond.  On Twitter I don’t follow tons of random people, hoping they will follow back, because I would rather pick people carefully, based upon mutual interests.  Right now though, everyone on G+ has one major thing in common, we all love SM.  So I can go over to Gini Dietrich’s list of people she has ‘Circled’ as being a good group to follow.  In fact, I followed all 35 people she has ‘Circled’.  I’m confident that every single person is someone, whose content I will enjoy.

And that is the issue right now.  We are easily 3 years away from G+ reaching the tipping point, heck it has been around a week, so why am I so panicked to get followers?  I don’t know, nor can I explain why I am so happy to have my numbers going up this quickly.  I guess it is just a golden time, where one can amass a ton of new connections, with confidence that almost all of them are worthwhile.

It’s Still Social

Still, once the amassing is done, it will mean zilch if I don’t then try to get to know my new friends.  That is what social media is all about, being social with one another.  It scares me a bit, because this is one additional time commitment.  Twitter is up on one monitor 24/7 and I keep one eye on it whenever I’m at my computer. Will I need to devote an entire monitor to G+?  Maybe.  Perhaps G+ will be the excuse I need to add a 4^th monitor to the computer? (I have given up on ever finding a super model who likes short, balding, nerdiness, so I have turned my affections towards the super computer.)  Honestly, I can’t imagine trying to juggle all that is going on, with less than 3 monitors.

Since I started playing on G+ about 4 hours ago, I have been added to another 52 circles.  It is the classic ‘Follow & Follow’ game, which I hate, and yet here I am adding people until my fingers bleed.  It is likely that in a few months, I’ll be railing on the practice.  So I am stuck with this dilemma, how long do I behave in a hypocritical fashion?

I don’t know, but I do know this…Google + is likely to be a force in SM, and there will never be a time in the future, where it will be so easy to find interesting people who share the same love this stuff.  So I best load up, before the spammers get here.

I just hope Gini circles me as one of the cool kids.