Google+ is the Google’s answer to Facebook, Twitter, and other online Social Media. You can look at an entertaining demo at “http://www.google.com/+/demo/”. Google+’s “Circle” feature allows the user to group friends thus addressing that age-old Facebook problem: “What do I do when my Mother wants to friend me?”. This feature takes a direct shot at a Facebook weakness, where all your friends are in a single monolithic group. “Spark” is a Twitter clone and Huddle is a nice way to do a group chat. Clearly Google is on a path to provide compelling services to its customers and to unify their online experience, and it looks pretty good to me.
Google+ comes to wireless? Well, not exactly but it is interesting how a good idea will appear in two different places at the same time. Bluesocket’s virtual WLAN (vWLAN) 2.1 release unifies wireless and wired security and management policies under a single vWLAN control instance, which can live on an appliance, virtual machine, or in the cloud. No additional hardware is required to bring in wired users, as the access points themselves are used to manage the wired users. Bluesocket has unified the experience for all types of users.
As with social media, the enterprise has long needed an easy way to group users and access points. To make administration of thousands of access points (APs) easy, vWLAN 2.1 introduces an advanced AP templates and grouping feature. It’s easy to group APs and apply similar configurations (SSIDs, Firmware, Radio Settings) and to see the status of these APs. Like Google+, you can keep your bosses’ AP in its own group, while you try out new features on the APs of your co-workers.
Like Google+, the vWLAN 2.1 release has recently entered the Beta phase, and the demand for both has been high. Fortunately, the 2.1 vWLAN Beta program doesn’t require a Google+ invite (last I checked you can buy one for $5 on e-bay), as it’s free to all current vWLAN customers–just contact your Bluesocket representative. If you are not a vWLAN customer and would like to take a look at the UI, your Bluesocket representative can arrange that, too. Speaking of $5, I’d wager $5 that Bluesocket’s vWLAN 2.1 becomes generally available (GA) long before Google+.