The Graduate Baruchian

You’ve heard about Google+ and you fall into two camps.  1) Yawn or 2) It’s about time.  There is, of course, another camp. . . what’s Google+?  What’s a netizen to do?  With this post we will help you analyze whether you should shift\adopt Google+ and how to make the migration from Facebook.

Let use our newly minted B-school (aka bullet school) knowledge and list the barriers to entry/exit along with a cost and benefit analysis.

You don’t need a 780  GMAT score to figure this out.  Is there any question?  Read on.

We here are the Graduate Baruchian are here optimize your migration into three easy steps. 1) Get a Google+ invite and create your account;  2) Migrate your frenemies ( I mean friends) and blackmail materials (oops, pictures); and prepare yourself, 3) Combine Facebook news feed with Google+

1 — Get an Invite to Google+

You are a savvy google-bing-find-my-research-on-wikipedia-and-crib-my-casestudy-from-obscure-blogs maven.  So I’m sure you can score an invite on your own.  If all else fails (or you are honing your

Yahoo Import Utility Under Contact Tab

delegating skills), you can send a request to my Google+ profile and I will send you an invite.  Create your profile, but don’t populate it too much yet.  Migrate your stuff first.

2 — Migrate

There’s a pretty easy way to get all those people out of Facebook.  Unfortunately this step involves setting up another (ugh, I know, but stick with me) online profile.  Let’s whack your peeps first.

1. Go to Yahoo and create a new profile. You can use your existing one if you have one.  I made a new one rather than contaminate my existing Yahoo account with the dross from Facebook.
2.  Under the contact tab click on the import tab and select Facebook. Voila!  All your peeps are now in your contacts
   

   Google Find&Invite Import Utility

3. Go to your Google+ account under circles and go to the Find and Invite page.  Google will creepily suggest everyone from the gmail account.  Co-opt this creepiness and link to your Yahoo account; or for that matter your hotmail account;
4. Now that didn’t work for me.  Some reason Google+ gave me the one-finger (aka unknown failure-retry) error.  Don’t fret.  We got  your back.  Go back to Yahoo and export to a local CSV file on your hard drive.  Then use the same find and invite routine and upload from a local file;
5. Will all your peeps as suggestions, drag them into circles that properly describe them (BFF, Friends with Benefits; Friends you can only tolerate when drunk; Jerks from class, but have an important jobs; Mom and her friends from church).  You can find other excellent ideas at Swiss Miss.

Now you have all these people in circles with your blank profile.  It’s time to get all those images.  For Chrome users, there’s a utility included.  You can find it here.  Photo Importer is a great add-on for Firefox that will help you easily move your images.  Here is the process I used:

1. Setup the add-on;
   

   PhotoImporter Add-on for Firefox

2. Browse to your Facebook account and to your photo section.  Go to each album.  On the PhotoImporter field enter the album name for each album. Click on Submit All Albums and click through the permissions.  The add-on will migrate them over.  It may take a while.
3. Best practices:  1) Scroll down the Facebook page to make sure every image is loaded on the page.  If your browser doesn’t load them, PhotoImporter won’t grab them; 2) Do one album at a time and confirm in Google+\Picasa that every picture migrated over and set the sharing permissions  3) Make and submit the photos of images where people tagged you.
4. Disable the add-on.  It takes up valuable real estate and I don’t need to migrate photos every day.

3 — Combine

Now it’s time to enjoy Google+ as  your primary social network.  But what about all the hangers on still at Facebook?  I used a StartGoogle+ add-on for Firefox so that I can see the Facebook news feed on Google+.  It’s still in beta and has caused Firefox to puke a couple of times.  It’s worth it though to have both social networks in one place.  In Chrome apparently it works better.  Here are the steps for Firefox:

StartGoogle+ Add-on for Firefox

1. Download and install the StartGoogle+ extension and restart Firefox.  Make a small donation;
2. Go to your Google+ page.  Notice the new toolbar on the upper-right hand side.  Setup your credentials for Facebook (and Twitter if want that combined too);
3. Open Facebook in another tab or window.  Make a test post and see what is on your news feed.  Check back on Google+ to make sure it is being picked up;
4. Log out of Facebook.  FB is uber creepy if you don’t specifically log out.  Just closing a tab or window won’t do.  FB will report to every page that you are there.   It’s nice if you want to instantly share, but embarrassing if you have a Hello Kitty fetish. I’m not saying the do-no-evil empire is any better.  In fact, such a low bar clearly invites ethical trespassing. It just different and worth a switch for now.

Now you are ready to compete your Google+ profile.  With all your images, you can now easily pick the ones you like.  Don’t forget to send invites to all your peeps without a Google profile.  You will notice a popup on the bottom of the screen.

Please comment on your experience.  There are better ways.  Please share.  Also, please share on why you use Google+, sticking with Facebook, or just don’t give a darn.  Lastly, share how long it took you. I spent about 3 hours migrating and more than writing it up, hah!