Google plus. Copycat or game changer?

Is Google+ yet another social networking service? Well kind of, but it is a lot more than that.

Google+ is primarily an Identity service as Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt stated in an interview earlier this year.

There are a lot of similarities between Facebook and the Google+ platform. There are also a lot of people who would compare these two giants against each other. In a way I feel it’s wrong but let’s look at some differences on the core concepts between these two.

The core function regarding the relationships between people are different, in Google+ you circle in people you know or share interests with, while on Facebook you send people a friend request which feels a bit more personal, and most of us would not send friend requests to random people just because we happened to be at the same event or have commented the same thread in a Facebook group for example. So in that regard the way you connect with other people, Google+ and Facebook are quite different.

It’s all about organizing your data in a way that makes sense to you

Google+ allows you to organize your friends in customized circles, like friends, family, co-workers or colleagues. This makes it easy for you to alter the privacy settings for each circle so you can choose who sees what.

Hold on! What about Facebook friends list?

Facebook has had a friends list function for some time now, but it is quite well hidden, little known and not used by the masses. This could be because Facebook does not like people to be private, i really don’t know. Facebook has made a lot of changes (I am reluctant to call these improvements) the last year, one I am really puzzled about is the change to their chat. It used to be an ok function for fast instant messages, and later Facebook changed it to end up as completely useless. Now I see friends that are offline mixed with people that are online and there is this little checkbox hidden under the settings icon that says “available to chat”. Does it filter away my offline friends? No, it sets my own chat to disabled mode. Ever heard of Skype? MSN? The standard options are Away, Online, Do not disturb and show as offline.

The problem with Facebook friends list is that it is not a central component of the service. The feature feels like it was tacked on, hidden behind confusing menus. Facebook has however added some new features to their platform, more on that in the next article.

So, who is winning the war between social platforms?

Google+ is not even in beta yet, you still need an invitation to be able to integrate your Gmail account with Google+ and it is mostly early adopters that have actually shown interest in this new platform. Google has immense amounts of resources at their disposal that they can integrate into the Google+ platform.  For example Google’s advert monetizing is light years ahead of Facebook’s, when it comes to interest based advert targeting.

Just to show an example of how well Google’s advert network actually can target people, here is an example:

Remember the movie Minority report where Tom Cruise’s character walks into a store and sees adverts on monitors that are targeted towards him based on his personality, lifestyle, interests etc. That is not the future, it’s the present! If you’re logged in on your Google account, check out this page to see how Google has “circled” your areas of interest to show you the most relevant ads when you are surfing the web.

To sum it up, I do not think Google+ will kill Facebook nor will it die off like other hyped projects (wave) that this mysterious giant has released. How it will evolve is yet to be seen.

Ready to join Google+?

Google+ is open for everyone to join so enter http://www.comaroundfree.com/Misc._applications/Other_software/Sign_up_for_Google_Plus-7424 to see how its done.