Saturday 2 July 2011

The Google+ Project


From last week, you may have seen the mysterious black bar appearing on the top of Google.com and some ads of Google. It was a sign of something about to show itself. Something big.The Google+. Google launched its much awaited social networking platform to a limited number of users.

What is Google+ ?

Is Google+ a destination like Facebook.com? Google’s said that this is the first step by the company in its long social journey, which is going to evolve. It’s the top-secret social project that Google has been working on for the past year led by General Patton (Vic Gundotra) and General MacArthur (Bradley Horowitz). Much like Facebook, it allows people to share and discuss status updates, photos and links but with different groups of people.

Some Features of Google+ :

In order to use Google +, you need to have a Google account. Once you set-up your Google account, you can invite people to your network.

Circles: The "Circles" idea initially looks promising. You can create a circle of contacts that are family, friends, work friends, former co-workers and so on. You can add more Circles as you like, and put the same person into more than one Circle. Its main benefit is it encourages more sharing because according to Google every online conversation is usually a “public performance” which means we often share less because of “stage fright”. But the horror comes when you have huge number of people to organise.



Sparks: It is a new feature that allows you to create topics of interest and use them as source of information and then share it with various different groups.‘Sparks’ functions just like a search engine but makes recommendations for content which could be suitable for you, according to the interests you enter. Content includes blog posts, articles and videos from across the web.



Hangouts: This just might be the killer feature of Google +. ‘Hangouts’ enable users to have a group video chat. Its camera switching feature changes who’s on camera based on who’s talking. It also allows several people to watch a YouTube video together, at the same time, whilst seeing each other’s reactions. You can click on the Hangout button and invite members of a certain group by sending them a notification.



Huddle: This is a mobile group-chat service.When you’re trying to get five different people to decide on a particular event, Huddle takes care of it by turning all those different conversations into one simple group chat.



Instant Uploads: It has also come up with a new approach to mobile photos & videos. Google calls it Instant Uploads.You can take a pic and it uploads to your Picasa or YouTube account and then you can share those videos via Google+ to specific “circles.”



Google+ vs. Facebook

Personally, I don't think that Facebook has anything to worry about. Google’s biggest challenge is to convince people to sign-up for yet another social platform, especially since more and more people are hooked to Facebook (750 million) and Twitter. Even I don’t feel quite compelled to switch from Facebook or Twitter to Google.

1. Unlike on Facebook, people do not have to agree to be friends with one another. They can receive someone’s updates without sharing their own.

2. When users visit their Google+ home page, they see three columns and a stream of status updates in the middle that looks similar to Facebook.

3. When people post on Facebook, which is mostly off-limits to search engines, Google loses valuable information that could benefit its search, advertising and other products.








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