I spent the weekend helping to set up the Facebook page and the Twitter account for the Ukulele Union of Boston. They have a big event coming up on July 28th, a Ukulele Melee at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum and it was high time they got a proper social media presence to promote it.

I’m pretty comfortable with Facebook and Twitter. I use them daily, mostly just for my own social life. I also helped Boston Scientific with their Women’s Health Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, so I have a good take on how to employ these tools in a public relations arena. What I’m saying is by the end of the weekend I thought we were in good shape and I was feeling pretty chuffed about my social media skill set.

Then I got my Google+ invitations.

I’ve only been playing around with this for about an hour, building my circles, going through copious amounts of email addresses, figuring out who to add and where. Setting up a Google+ account is a lot of work! Maybe I’m just wiped out on social media following this weekend, but so far, I’m less than impressed. It’s not terribly intuitive and visually Google+ is blander than a mayonnaise sandwich on Wonderbread. Of course, I haven’t started using it really, so it’s hard to discern what the Facebook-killer hype is all about. Buzz didn’t work for me because I thought it shared to much, too much of what I was reading, too much of what my friends were recommending. Instead of getting a curated feed I was getting a firehose in the face. I hope the stream of information from Google+ feeds will be less overwhelming, but with the ability to share even our search results with friends, I can’t help but wonder if Google+ is going to provide more content than we could possibly consume.

What are your thoughts? Is this just the learning curve I’m dealing with? Do you see Google+ as the Facebook killer, or is it gone by way of Buzz and Wave? Does the Google model of online app development work for social networks, or should they have waited until they had something more fleshed out before going beta? Is Google+ trying to be too many things without doing any one of them well? Do I need a nap? Maybe I just need a nap.