Google Plus is making waves among technology savvy social networkers. Like so many other Google products, this one is in beta and is gradually opening up to more users. One unique aspect separates Plus from other Google services. Unlike Facebook or Twitter where one accesses the ‘firehose’ of data that one subscribes to and is dependent on the Friends/Following, and where users mostly use features like groups/lists etc to sort out noise from the stream, Plus uses a different approach and lets users create ‘circles’ that allow them to separate streams. This is a more manageable approach for dealing with the humongous amount of incoming data that social networks generate.

It’s been quite an interesting week on the Google front, with the launch of one new service after another. The one making the biggest waves (if you pardon the pun) has been Google+ (plus). Having wrangled an invite, I used it for a couple of hours. These are some first impressions.

It shouldn’t be surprising that I’m making lots of comparison to Facebook which is the defacto social networking standard right now.

Last week Google launched App Inventor a visual development tool to build Android applications.  This tool will allow anyone to create an Android app without writing even a single line of code.

The App Inventor comes loaded with many blocks for creating UI elements, programming blocks, storage blocks, social blocks, media blocks etc, these blocks can be arranged in to logical sequence by drag and drop to develop an application.