TMCnet Feature

In the Internet world, Google (News - Alert) is undoubtedly the major giant, but in the field of social services, Google has failed to grab the social networking market until the recent creation of Google+.  Facebook (News - Alert) is the forerunner in the field of social networking with more than 750 million active users. Now Google has launched Google+ to compete with Facebook and the race for best social networking has begun.

Before developing Google Plus, Google first tried Google Wave and then Google Buzz but neither were much of a success. When Google unveiled the Google+ project, many were skeptical, but all were curious.

A PC World article explains that Facebook tweaked its photo viewer interface, making it look a lot like its counterpart on Google+. The new widescreen photo viewer is now live for most Facebook users, who don’t have to scroll down anymore to see the comments for a certain photo.

The new Facebook photo viewer is an improvement over its previous iteration. Photos are now larger, comments are easier to scan and the box around pictures drags you in, however, there are striking similarities between the new Facebook photo viewer and Google+. The only difference between the Google+ photo viewer and Facebook’s is a darker background and more black space between the picture and comments.

However, the photo viewer is not the first Google+ feature that is similar to, and inspired Facebook.

On Google+, you're encouraged to invite more and more people as you add contacts to your Circles or list. This shows that there's no cap on the invites or the number of people who can join right now.

Less might seem more for Google, but somehow the large white empty spaces on your profile page just don't convey the happening feeling of Facebook with pages, apps, requests, and more.

In Facebook you make friends, on Google+ you create Circles. Facebook’s equivalent is the List. Google+ allows you to cycle among your contacts in circles, drag and drop contacts from one circle to another and delete circles.

Sparks are interests that you can follow on your stream on Google+. They are not like Facebook pages rather more like Google news with links to the original news source, still a clever way to integrate search with social.

Facebook pages take an eternity to load and the videos can bring even the quickest Internet connection to its knees. Google+ is quick as clicking on a tab loads it without almost any delay.

On Google+ you can video chat with up to 10 friends simultaneously using the Hangouts feature. There's no set leader and the control flows back and forth among different members flawlessly. The Skype (News - Alert) video chat introduced by Facebook does not allow group video chat using the feature.

The Facebook privacy settings are hidden so well that most users don't know how to access them. Fortunately, Google+ holds alternate views as far as user privacy is concerned. Most privacy settings are quite easy to access, change and control. For instance, you can easily turn off photo sharing, by the way all your Picasa uploads are available on your profile, control which Circles have what level of visibility to your profile and content and so on.

Some may ask, should Google+ win the race in the field of social networking defeating Facebook? The answer may be yes or may be no. We have to remind users that Facebook is already an established social networking site and Google+ is new. Google is the one and only likely company that can defeat Facebook and grab the social networking market. Google+ assures better privacy and it combines all the useful features of Facebook and twitter.