Plus One for Google !

The new kid on the social networking block, Google+, has made an impressive start to its story. Larry Page announced last week that Google+ has amassed more than 10 million users, when Google declared its Q2 results for this year. Now all this in 3 weeks, with the additional roadblock of being invite-only in the current phase, is a noteworthy achievement, even for Google.

With innovations like Circles, Hangouts and Sparks, Google+ is really taking up a challenge against the social networking monster that lies in front of it, Facebook. Strong signals of Facebook's fright from the new Google product can be felt when a lot of Facebook executives themselves are joining Google+ (Mark Zuckerberg has a profile on it too) just to see what these guys are up to. Even the man who was at the core of creating the Circles concept, and is now working for Facebook, is feeling a little weary of his own baby.

Circles, as the name suggests, lets the user create different circles of people in his account. How this helps is in privacy. One circle can be clearly demarcated from another and it lets you choose what information to share with which circle, and what to hide. You can make different circles for buddies who you'd want to grow old with, and those which are just mere acquaintances, or for close relatives and others who you've just vaguely heard of (or not even that in some cases). So it's a neat way at segmentalizing your contacts, something that takes a lot of work and patience on Facebook and comes naturally on Plus.

Hangouts, as the name suggests again, lets you create a 'hangout' or a place where people meet up. People can be your friends, relatives, other circles or just strangers. It has the provision of providing 10 video feeds from different people and as a neat little quirk, it puts the person with the loudest voice on the fore of the page. A great way to have a conference with a bunch of friends, or a meeting of the board of directors of your company !

Sparks aims at changing the way the world shares news. What it does is that it will provide you with news and feeds from around the world on a topic of your interest, thus giving you ways to spark conversations (yes, that is how it gets the name). Might look harmless now, but Plus is taking a up a lot of people's Twitter time by these simple features. With a more efficient way to upload straight from your phones and linking your Picasa web albums with your profile, apart from the ones already mentioned, Facebook does have a lot of to worry about in the coming months. Once Google+ is out of its invite-only phase and becomes free to public use, its mettle will be put to the real test. Can it survive a market that is almost completely monopolized by the Palo Alto giants, and not just stop there; can it become the much fantasized about Facebook killer?

Facebook v/s Facebook

Facebook - a common name used in every other household, is the largest social networking website on the planet. And it doesn't get bigger than Facebook. As of July 2011, it has more than 750 million active users and a valuation of more than $75 billion. I could bore you with more numbers but I won't, since they all say the same thing. Facebook is the best of it's kind now, and the best there has ever been or will be in the forseeable future.

However, even the product created out of Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room has limitations. And we're just starting to see them now. Take the chat feature on the website which enables the users to chat with their friends online. The developers keep reinventing it, and their ultimate rendition has been stamped by its millions of users as trashy and unnecessary again. In order to try and improve it, they have made it worse - thus dealing themselves a minor blow. People are now turning to other chat agents such as Adium or Pidgin, for Mac and Windows users respectively. That's gotta pinch, at least, right?

But then you could argue against this point, since small changes like these have made Facebook what it is now. It has come a long way from the chunky website it was back in 2004, to the sleek and sober website it has become today. The 'like' button for instance, was a small change made a while ago - just a single word added to the other option of 'commenting' on something. However, it changed the way people communicated their feelings online, which is all that social networking is about. In a way it also inspired the +1 project by Google, I'm sure, but they probably won't admit it.

The new photo viewer doesn't seem that new anymore now, does it? When it appeared on the website, the majority of users were up in arms against it, maintaining that adding something to the website which isn't necessary just adds to the clutter. Those same users now find the convenience of browsing photo albums on the photo viewer a god-send, rather a Mark-send. Change is inevitable. So what if the change doesn't seem to be good at the first look, as long as it's not bad it will work eventually.

With Facebook killing competition in every form, from Orkut to MySpace and Hi5 to Google Wave (Google Plus is still a newbie, and we must give it time to make a comparison) there might come a time in the future where it kills itself since it'll only be competing with itself. We netizens don't want that now, do we?