All we know for now is that Google+ has been open to a chosen few for just over a week and generated a lot of excitement – or frustration, if you haven’t been able to join it yet.

Let’s agree about one thing. The service is impressive, but predicting the death of Flickr and Facebook at this stage might be a bit premature. This is the very beginning – Google+ has barely left its starting blocks. Let the service grow and gain critical mass first.

So I won’t tell you whether this is the next big thing for photographers, whether it’s going to revolutionise the way we share images or any other crystal-ball crap. Instead, let me list the things I do like about Google+ (from a photographer’s perspective) after a week of playing with the service.

1. Picasa integration. I never thought I would go back to Picasa, but here I am. I used it ages ago as a desktop application well before it was bought by Google. Then, when it became a part of the Google app package, I used it occassionally, mostly to share some private photos with friends and family.

But now Picasa – soon to be known as “Google Photos, formerly known as Picasa” – has become a very attractive proposition for G+ users. Here is why:

• Unlimited storage. If you are Google+ user, you can store an unlimited number of images up to 2048x2048px in size. Anything larger than that will count towards your standard 1Gb storage. Also videos up to 15 minutes long will enjoy unlimited storage. Anything longer than that will again dent your 1Gb limit. There are no guarantees of course that this won’t change in the future, but for now this is pretty awesome.
• Editing. If you have been using Picasa, you’ve probably seen or used Picnik for basic image adjustments. Google+’s adjustments are even more basic and are limited to rotating the image and applying six basic filters. So you’re probably better off working on your images before uploading them to your albums. But still, compared to Facebook, your editing options are slightly more robust.
• Tagging people. You can tag people, who will then be notified and will have the ability to remove the tag. If someone else tags you in a photo, you can reject or approve the tag, but if you do approve, the image will be associated with your profile, i.e. visible to people in your circles.
• Comments. A simple but smart solution – comments display not underneath the image, but in a column to the right of it, which means you don’t have to scroll down to read them.
• Lightbox. When you go to an album, Picasa smartly redistrubutes the images within it on the page so that they form a nice mosaic. Like it or not, it’s neat. Clicking on a single image opens it in the lightbox (“on black”, in Flickr-speak) and offers a nice clutter-free experience. Frome here you can navigate to other images in the same album and perform all the actions described above.
• Data. Each G+ photo comes with some basic EXIF data (if available), the date the image was taken and a clickable histogram.

2. Mini-portfolio. That’s my name for it. Not sure what the technical term is, but when you create or update your profile, you have the ability to upload 5 images that will be displayed underneath your name every time someone reads your profile info.

Quite powerful if you want to highlight your best work or, say, define your photographic style in five thumbnails.

3. InstaGram. If you’re using InstaGram and wish you could display your images on a larger screen, why not transfer all IG images to Picasa/Google+?

So far I’ve come across two different IG solutions, one which allows you to import your InstaGram archive into Picasa and another one, which updates your existing InstaGram Picasa album with every new IG image you take.

Both solutions are a bit clumsy at this stage, but remember the service is brand new and we’ll probably have to rely on many hacks before a more seamless integration of external services becomes a reality.

I realise that this post will probably feel dated a few months from now. Google+ is very likely to evolve and become very powerful very quickly. It may even become a threat to other photo-sharing services, but it’s much too early to predict to what degree, if at all.

So instead of playing with your crystal ball, spend some time discovering how you can use Google+ to your advantage now.

This week I managed to get to Thomson/Reuters’s swanky headquarters in Canary Wharf to take part in an unconference called 1pound40.

Some great minds – from journalists to social media specialists – spent the afternoon discussing the impact of social media on politics and news, among other things. Not surprisingly, Twitter became the main focal point of most of our sessions.

Whether we discussed the power of social media in changing politics or whether Twitter and social media in general can curate news, the discussions always became more general as we were all trying to define the influence of Twitter and other tools on our lives.

It’s impossible to summarise all our discussions and thoughts, but I’d like to mention two keywords that cropped up several times during the session and which will be quite important in our future discussion about social media. I list them here in no particular order of importance:

- transliteracy: not a new term, but an increasingly important one. I was lucky enough to share the table with professor Sue Thomas of Leicester University, who has been writing about transliteracy for years. Transliteracy is in my opinion a pre-requisite to a successful engagement with social media – or media in general. The ability to write, read and communicate across a wide variety of mostly digital, but also analogue platforms, and the ability to create value using the most appropriate tools and platforms for your needs is absolutely crucial. It’s surprising how many people who should be transliterate – journalists, for example – are still reluctant to embrace another medium and turn it into their advantage. Such approach is unsustainable and short-sighted. Period.

- curating content: in other words, trying to embrace the wealth of knowledge and information social media offer us. But how? Richard Sambrook asked whether Twitter and social media can curate news and provide a framework for trust. Yes they can, but with (sometimes severe) limitations. Should news companies like the BBC even curate content from Twitter? If so, how do you approach the issue of trust (by sticking to journalistic principles, I’d say – check, cross-check, verify – don’t just republish)? Curating content might be the way forward, but the biggest issue – after trust – is the volume of information. How do you cope with that? How do you filter it out? Twitter lists might be one solution, but Twitter is just one tool among hundreds available.

I’m hoping to explore the issue of content curation over the next few months, but your thoughts on it – or any of the above issues – are welcome.

(There are some pictures from 1pound40 over on my Posterous blog)

‘Cause if you haven’t, you might want to read this brilliant and rather shocking piece by Paul Carr, “After Fort Hood, another example of how ‘citizen journalists’ can’t handle the truth”. Whether you like Paul Carr or not, he’s made a few very valid points around the issues of privacy and morality of social media – and citizen journalists in particular – with two videos to back them up (warning: one of the videos contains graphic images of the final moments of Neda Agha-Soltan, killed during the Iranian election protests earlier this year). I won’t summarise the post here, please read it and draw your own conclusions.

Just don’t interpret Paul’s words as a sweeping statement which has little to do with reality. It isn’t. And I was reminded of it while reading this article about a man in south London, who brought traffic to a halt by threatening to jump off a building.

The incident lasted for hours and obviously attracted a large crowd. Some people shouted for him to jump. Others, as is obvious from the picture that accompanies this article, were filming or photographing the man.

Even without Paul Carr’s article I didn’t doubt for a moment that had the man jumped, the video would have been uploaded to YouTube within a matter of hours. Do you?

What you say says a lot about who you are. Granted, not everyone is on Twitter to spread groundbreaking ideas, analyse the world in 140 characters or offer you solutions to your problems.

But some people’s use of Twitter reveals a distinct lack of content. Or at least any meaningful content.

So maybe this totally unscientific list of my observations from using Twitter might give you some idea as tho what to expect – or who to avoid – when the following happens:

• when someone keeps saying ‘uh, oh – another 1000 followers, well thanks, but not sure why you’re following me, I’m so boring’ they probably are. Unfollow.
• then again some people will only talk numbers – numbers of followers, tweets, retweets, their position in the most retweeted charts, etc. Unless you’re an accountant and/or define your life by the number of people you follow, avoid.
• if the person you follow keeps talking about their cat only – perhaps they should get their cat a profile. Unfollow.
• Twitter is full of specialists. Or ‘specialists’. To become a specialist and to gain and share specialist knowledge takes a while. Or at least longer than ‘since last Tuesday’
• if someone follows you and they follow 2,000 other people, but have only one update: “Cheap Viagra/laptop/iPod” – do what you would do with an email with the subject line ‘Cheap Viagra”
• retweeting is useful, in fact that’s what makes Twitter uniquely fast. But retweeting absolutely everything all the time is like reading a newspaper aloud on a packed train. A bit unsocial.
• Twitpic is for sharing pictures. Drunken, fuzzy shots you took with your mobile while covering the lens with your finger make for great content only once in a while. Don’t overdo it.

Totally unscientific, purely empirical. Agree to disagree.