Can Google+ kill Facebook? Twitter?

Google's new social networking platform Google+ is less than a fortnight old, but already people are begging for invitations to the closed beta. Is it time to get on-board? And could it really be a threat to Facebook?

In Patch Monday this week, we discuss Google+ with three early adopters who are already seeing benefits.

"I'm already finding myself and a number of other people are going to Google+ before we go to Twitter," said social computing and business futures consultant Kate Carruthers, who, less than four months ago, told us that Twitter was her standard way of "connecting to the matrix".

"When you think of what high-volume Twitter users some of us are, [that's] a really worrying trend for Twitter," she said.

We also hear from James Fridley, co-founder of Digital Citizens, and freelance journalist and blogger Neerav Bhatt.

"Is now a time for a consumer to get on-board? Sure. Why not?" Fridley said. "So long as they have an understanding that it is really still only probably about 75 per cent done."

But let's not forget what this is really about. "This is basically a giant data mining operation," said Bhatt. "People voluntarily link themselves in and feed even more data into Google than they did before."

There's also my usual look at some of the week's news headlines.

To leave an audio comment on the program, Skype to stilgherrian, or phone Sydney 02 8011 3733.

Running time: 34 minutes, 31 seconds