A Competitor For Facebook – Google+ Social Network

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When Google launched their new social networking technology, Google + or Google Plus, they knew that they were in one of the most competitive market, especially when there are number of other social networking sites like Facebook, Buzz, Orkut, Digg, twitter and many more. Of all these, the murmurs in the market are that, Facebook is going to put up a tough challenge against Google Plus Social network.

While Buzz and Wave are their content sharing social networks, Google Plus is going to network you socially with a difference. What this is going to do is that the initially Google has made your +1’s public, nevertheless, this comes with a privacy option too, which we will see in the later part of our discussion. Google +1’s is a two way channel, this will try to reach your connections who will be a better target audiences for you and also sees and allows you to access, which +1’s are much useful for you. Some of the social connections that Google links you with are as follows:

• People in your Gmail or Google Talk,
• Contacts in your my contact list, if you have not grouped one, then do it one to enjoy the benefit of Google Plus one,
• People in your Google + Circles, and
• Those contacts that are following you in Google Reader and Google Buzz.

Now coming back to the privacy of Google plus, this like other social networks, especially similar to Facebook, allows you to decide on who or which group of people will be visiting your +1’s, and can block the rest from reaching your +1s. Moreover, unless the other person blocks you, you will always be able to view their +1s, which entirely depends on how the Google social search uses the social connections.

What many of the analysts have observed is that the Google Plus one network adopts all the goodies from many of the other social networks like circles, sparks, hangouts, instant uploads and huddle. One such evidence that this technology from Google is closely competing with Facebook is the use of Circles, which like Facebook allows you to decide the group of people who can see your +1s. Besides one of the other main features, that Google has adopted from many of the other social network is to enable this +1 feature being added to your website at the desired location and size, like a widget.

Some of the other features that are much similar to Facebook are: Sparks works like an RSS feeder, which is much similar to Facebook’s news feed, which permits you to add information that interests you the most on your profiles’ news feed column. Hangouts is like an adoption from Skype that permits video chatting and like IM chat rooms, this tool also permits to have a conference video chat amongst 10 members on your circles. Facebook has been widely popular for sharing photos and videos, which helps you to stay in touch with your friends, family and colleagues, while Google Plus one uses Instant upload which also works in a similar fashion and in fact is much better than that of Facebook. Here you can set to automatically upload photos and videos to your private album for a later decision, while this has an additional option of geo tagging facility.

Finally, if there is some comparable feature to Facebook, then this is Huddle, which is much similar to Beluga, which is a recent addition to Facebook, and you can have a group chat using your phone.

What is more interesting is Google Plus one allows you to mark your favorite links while performing a Google search, which is an added advantage that Facebook cannot receive but a Facebook search fetches Bing results – who knows there may be a Facebook button coming next to Bing search results in future!