Thanks to an early invite from Raanan I played with Google+ over the week­end. I want to jot down one thought about how Google+ treats identity.

A sig­nif­i­cant bar­rier to entry for many social tools is find­ing the peo­ple you already know who are using the ser­vice. This is what gets you hooked on a social service.

After log­ging in and explor­ing the UI for a bit I went to start cre­at­ing cir­cles. Here are the options, besides search of course, Google gives for find­ing people.

Yahoo! and Hotmail are the only two exter­nal con­tact sources I can use. ¹ Those of us who have taken the time and care­fully cre­ated lists of peo­ple we fol­low else­where should be able to import those net­works directly into Google+. I don’t par­tic­u­larly care about the peo­ple Google rec­om­mends for me to follow.

With all the data Google has they could be pop­u­lat­ing lists of peo­ple. Instead pre­sent­ing new users with their email address book, Google rec­om­men­da­tions, and Yahoo! and Hotmail imports Google+ could instead be pulling data from Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, and much more. Break each ser­vice into a fil­tered list and voilà, easy and rel­e­vant user dis­cov­ery for first-time users.

Our iden­ti­ties online are formed by much more than our address books. If Google+ is what comes next it would be nice if they acknowl­edged and worked with this.

What’s impor­tant as a first run expe­ri­ence on Google+ is whether the peo­ple I fol­low else­where are already there. The eas­ier it is for peo­ple to bring in their exist­ing net­works of friends and fol­low­ers the bet­ter Google+ will fare.