Google Plus: So that's the deal with instant upload

Right after the announcement of Google+ I took the demo, read a bit about the features and was excited about some. Hangouts, Huddle, Circles - they all seemed pretty cool to me. Earlier today, when they apparently opened up signups to just about anyone I finally managed to get in and look around.

The circles make sense, I'm glad to see that one person can occur in several circles. Huddle seems interesting, though I'll only be able to really try it out once more of my friends start to join. To be quite honest, I haven't been able to even find hangouts...

But the one thing I currently seem to like best are the photos. Because of two reasons: Geo location display and Instant Upload.

At first I really couldn't care less about the latter. From the simple descriptions I read of it, it was nothing more than just being able to upload photos from your phone to a social network. Big deal, there isn't a social network that doesn't do that. And even into a private folder, it said. Why would I take a picture, share it to Google+ and then later when I get home login and publish the photo somewhere in a public album.

Turns out it's, pardon my french, way cooler than that. The deal with Instant Upload is that, when enabled, it uploads any photo you take with your smartphone to a folder they call "From my phone". You can then select a photo, and share it to your stream. This selecting basically works the same as the process of sharing a photo to Facebook from their app with two essential differences:

1. By the time you select the photo to share to your stream, it is already uploaded. So it's shared instantly
2. You can - obviously - also access the "From my phone" folder through your browser

To make matters even more interesting. If you're concerned about privacy, you can turn Instant Upload off - but apart from that then you obviously can't see your phone's camera photos in your webbrowser anymore this won't change anything in the sharing experience. It will just be a little bit slower.

I chose to also let it sync all the photos from my phone into Google+. Apart from the sharing feature, it does make for a very nice interface to just browse through my photos.