Google just turned a really cool new feature in Google+. It is called “Ripples” and it’s a pretty interesting way of visualizing how posts or other stuff shared to the network gets shared and travels through the Google+ universe.

While it is still rolling out, being able to see Ripples for any individual post is pretty simple. Just click on the menu button in the upper right corner of a post item.

Once you click on the “View Ripples” menu item you will be presented with a page displaying all the data about the sharing of that post item in all its data porn glory – or not.

Because that is where this proves that as cool as the data might be, it won’t mean squat for the majority of users on Google+. I joked about how depressing it was to look at the Ripples for one of my posts, or rather total lack of any Ripples, and at almost 10,000 <gasp> followers I’m not doing too bad for stuff getting shared, except that Ripples shows how that isn’t the case.

As with most things to do with social networks, things like Ripples are really cool if you have a large number of followers, and in turn, and those followers have large numbers of followers, so on and so on. But, for the average user looking at the Ripples for your own posted items, it will further emphasize how little you and your “stuff” has any real impact on the larger scale of things.

For the famous and well followed on the other hand, things like ripples are awesome, not to mention real ego massagers, and for the rest of us it makes for a nice diversion.

In my opinion, I think that the people that be the most excited over this, will be the stat geeks and marketers. Things like Ripples, and the ease of how the data is made available, will prove to be the secret sauce that will bring them running.

[Cross-posted at Winextra]