First thoughts on Google+.
Hello everyone, Chris Moody here. Tonight I’d like to discuss another tech toy that has recently been rolling out. Today we talk about Google+, if you don’t have your invite yet, I hope to see you on it soon!
If you have been following the buzz of Google+ you will realize that this certainly isn’t the first post recently about Google+. Everyone right now is debating “Is Google+ a Facebook killer, or just another competitor.
Many people think that nothing can take down Facebook, but if you have been in the social media game long enough, people said the same about MySpace, which was just sold at a huge loss. When it was hot, MySpace ruled as king in the social space, and everyone had Tom as a friend. They of course were not the first to play in this circle, though I never had anything to do with their predecessors.
So what sets Google+ apart from Facebook? As you have probably heard by now, its Circles. While Facebook has groups, those require two (or more) people to join in order for them to really work. However in Google+ circles is how you see your friends. Your able to send your message to just the people in the group. So for example instead of needing all of your Family to join a special Group, in order to have inner group just drag your family members to this circle. Then when you tell Google+ to send a message to your Family group, it instantly will go to all of them.
However probably the bigger thing to set them apart, even with the new connection between Skype and Facebook, is Hangout which allows you to have a conversation with 9 people via video / voice at the same time. This is opposed to the one on one that Facebook/Skype allows you to have. I can see this as being huge when Google+ allows businesses coming on. Imagine being able to have small intimate groups of people learning about a new product and able to ask questions. For most people however, this will make it easier to share images of babies, or plan what your going to do during your next visit. Text can only take you so far.
Now if your one of the people who spends hours on Facebook playing various games from Zynga or others, you probably won’t be to happy with Google+ unless your wanting to quit. Currently there currently no way to make a Google+ app. Many people are currently very happy with this. Google does promise an API is coming, so we will just need to wait and see what kind of things are generated from that.
For this to really be a Facebook killer, a lot of people are going to need to switch to it. This currently is the big question. People in the Tech site of things are very unhappy with how Facebook handles privacy, however a good portion of the users, don’t seem to care to their default “opted-in” environment.
