TMCnet News
How Google+ Compares With FacebookNairobi, Jul 25, 2011 (The Nation/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) -- In the past weeks, social media has witnessed the birth of Google+ project. Facebook has also revamped its features in a bid to retain supremacy in the social cyber-world. The roll-out of Google+ has rejuvenated Google's quest for a strong presence in the social scene. It has in the past cast its might in the social scene with products like Orkut and Google Buzz. The Orkut social networking site was launched in January 2004, one month before the launch of Facebook. It was the project of a Turkish software engineer employed at Google, and the Facebook phenomenon springs from the social activities of a former Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook has experienced a meteoric rise since its inception. For Google, the quest has never ended. The company has re-engineered its ambitions in the social scene by rolling-out the Google+ project. How is the new kid on the block faring with the dominant player? Video Chat The news of Google+ might have fuelled the revamping of Facebook with an additional feature called video-chat, which was aided by an agreement between Skype and the social network. The same feature of video-chat is quite elaborate in Google+ under the Hangouts option. Here, users can video chat with others for free. Though Facebook has added a similar facility to its network, the one by Google is slightly unique since it encompasses group video chats in addition to one-on-one chats. The Facebook video chat feature lacks group chats for now. There are also other social activities under Hangouts which spice-up the social nature of Google+. Groups vs Circles The Google+ project has been designed with a much simpler way of grouping social friends and other users using the circles feature. For Facebook, there is an option of creating groups. In Google+, the better part of circles is that the user can control what one is sharing with each group while in Facebook group users might unknowingly find themselves broadcasting information to everyone by default. However, Facebook groups' actions can be customised by adjusting the privacy settings. The circle feature of Google+ allows users to group people. It also allows sharing of the desired things with the right people. The other features on Google+ are, instant Upload for photos, Huddle and Sparks. A contentious issue that remains unclear among the two companies is in regard to user data privacy. The Google+ is yet to face the wrath of privacy proponents who have kept Facebook on its toes in regard to handling of users' information. Betting on the fact that on-line business and social media depend on user data for web-analytics and marketing purposes, the issue of privacy might as well be an illusion. In Facebook, some suspected features exposing users to data breaches are designed in the website by default. One case has been the recent addition of 'Tag Suggestions' which relies on facial recognition for photo tagging in Facebook profiles. The Google+ project feature of tagging photos has technically avoided such an approach. The issue of privacy was among the snags in development of Google's earlier social network, called Google Buzz. The trouble with Google Buzz was glaring privacy issues and lack of transparent options for opt-ins. This weakness, in addition to other factors, made users back away from the Google social product. It's a lesson that Google seems to have learnt as it rolls out the Google+ project. Future prospects and numbers The Google+ project is still in its infancy and faces an uphill task against established social networks like Facebook and even against the micro-blogging site Twitter. The features notwithstanding, the social media scene is bracing for a renewed effort by Google to get a slice of the millions of users currently hosted by Facebook. Google company is ranked at number one globally in terms of traffic flow. On the other hand Facebook is the most used social network, with a leading membership and public visitations. Facebook has more than 750 million active users and the number is ever increasing. Google+ social media has attained more than 10 million users within its first two weeks of launch. Google is a titan in Internet search and Web related services and its muscle in the social scene can only be beefed up by refining and integration of Google+ with other Google services, and to some extent, by also tapping from symbiotic survival relations in cyberspace. The writer is a telecommunication engineer. |