On Monday afternoon, I decided to use Google+ to post the slides of a talk I had just given at the Monterey Shootout 2011. I really like how pictures and videos are handled by Google+, and using it to present one of my talks (which are typically picture-heavy) seemed to be perfect.

On Tuesday, at 3:38PM, an underwater photographer named Elena Kalis shared my talk with her circles on Google+. At around 7pm, I uploaded 33 underwater pictures to my Scrapbook. At 9:47pm, Vic Gundotra shared a link to the album. At 10:04pm, Brian Rose did, as well. Sergey Brin left a few comments shortly after 11pm (Mr. Brin dabbles in underwater photography, himself). Robert Scoble picked up and shared the album at 12:32am.

At 12:56am, just 6 hours after I updated my scrapbook and 9 hours after Elena shared out the link to my talk, 1,430 people have me in their circles. 1,430 happens to be the exact number of Twitter followers I have. That’s right: it took me 2 days on Google+ to arrive at the same number of followers I attracted on Twitter in 1644 days.¹ Granted, I use Twitter as a broadcast service and tweet about all sorts of random things, but the reception to my photography over on Google+ has been nothing short of incredible. After spending a couple hours on the site tonight, it is obvious that the reception to ALL FORMS of photography at Google+ is fantastic, and that engagement levels are extremely high.

Methinks I will be spending some time over there. Want an invite? +Eric Cheng

Side note: What’s amusing is that this post will get picked up automatically by Facebook and Twitter, but not by Google+. I’m really looking forward to a time when Google+ gets integration with HootSuite and other social media aggregators.