• Technology

Every now and then we get a new killer amongst our midst; our midst being those associated and interested in the tech world. Think about it, how many killers have you known in the past few years? There have been iPhone killers, Flip killers, iPad killers etc etc. The newest entrant on this list is the Facebook killer. Yes, somebody has finally decided to take on Zuckerberg in full frontal battle.

The killer comes from that laboratory of many experiments, Google, with a very simple moniker—Google+. Launched not more than a month ago, the social network is the hottest new thing going around. When entry was restricted, we heard of invites showing up on eBay. Flaunting invites to give away was also a nice way to get many quick followers on Twitter. We got ours pretty quickly thanks to a benevolent friend based in Silicon Valley.

We have been decently skeptical of all Google has come up with in the networking space. The less said about Buzz the better, but to be honest, we were very buzzed about Google Wave when it first came out. As one of the first ones to get an invite, we too knew what it felt like to be God for a day.
We liked the Wave, and even recommended it to our users. Sadly, Wave has been retired. It is not yet fully explained why it did not work.

The mechanism
Perhaps, in technology, it’s not as much about if you can make it, but if people are ready for it. Google+ may have got that right. People are in the know about what a social networking tool can do for them personally and professionally. For businesses, it has been about the closest contact that they could ever hope to make with their audience.

Google+ is not vastly different in mechanism from Facebook, in terms of you making a network of the people you know for yourself. That is the basic premise, but how you make friends with them and share information with them is its differentiator with Facebook.

In Google+, your Google/Gmail account is your gateway into the Google+ realm and the way you end up connecting to people. Invariably, the contacts that Google will suggest you add or invite would be from your Gmail contacts list. In that sense, you will immediately replicate your professional and personal contacts on to Google+.

Till here, the network pretty much replicates Facebook, but with one crucial difference. Facebook clamped down on using Gmail as a valid service to find friends from on its Friend Finder feature sometime ago as part of a tit-for-tat (if that was the tit, we do not remember what the tat was). Given that everyone worth his nickel lives on Google to some extent, that does give Google+ a clear lead.

That circles thing
One of the greater peeves about Facebook has been how it pushes you to share information with friends, which makes you slightly apprehensive of making new friends. Actually, the question of sharing dictated whom you made friends with. But then, why add them? What if you did not accept their request, what would they think about that? Sure, there is the limited profile bit, but again it functions in all-in, all-out fashion, and is tedious enough to tailor it for different individuals. Again, here we are forced to club all in or out together.

The Circles feature in Google+ solves that quandary beautifully. Here, you can add everyone you know into predefined and self-created circles. You can create any Circle. Someone has a “Chicks I dig” circle too.

Here is the beauty of this feature. Everyone you add knows that you have added him or her to his circles. But they do not know what circle you may have added on to them.

On the sharing information bit, you can preset what information you would like to share with which circles as far your profile information and photos go. While updating your status stream, you can further decide what circles can be privy to that bit of information.

All the others
Once you have your circles up and running, you would have a working stream like Facebook. You can post text, photos, links and even your location via the status update bar. The good bit is the instant upload option. Compared to the way Facebook lets you upload video and pictures, this one feels like Simone White singing to you by the seaside. Awesome. But there is also a problem here, as Google+ does not let you share from your profile, but from the home page only. User interface FAIL.

Your stream will be a mix of videos, links, pictures, text rants. You can also +1 whatever that you come across the net, and that will be shared across the stream too. One of the better things about Google+ is that it lets you turn off sharing or commenting on your posts. So, that way, a rant against your girlfriend might never reach her, though we advise against it.

What you could do to make it more interesting is use Sparks, a feature that lets make a special stream with news on your area of interest. You can choose any of the prefixed usual ones or make your own.

This is a good feature but fails on two fronts—for one, it only feeds me what we could pull from Google News via the Alerts route or just by searching on Google. The second bit it fails on is that it is not integrated with our regular stream. Why can’t it show up on my newsfeed, as it would if I like a page on Facebook?

The last interesting new feature with Google+ is the hangout function, which is essentially a big group chat thing. You all get on your cameras and talk to each other. Everyone can see everyone and voila, you are hanging out on Google+. It’s a fun function, and teenyboppers might like it instantly.

But we see a larger role for it in being able to facilitate conference calls for professionals and businesses. Our wish would be to see it work with Google Apps users, which could mean team members talking to each other via video.

Where does it stand?
The aforementioned leads on to our biggest grouse with Google+. How does a small business use it? Where are the rivals of the pages, groups and social adverts? If they are there, why don’t we know about them? We hear that “Business Profiles” are on the way and with them a host of opportunities for businesses in search, e-commerce, customer service, analytics etc. But in putting businesses second, Google+ may already have lost that battle. Though we hope to be proved wrong.

So, will Google+ kill Facebook? No, because that would need the single biggest migration of humans on earth, physical or virtual. Sure, Google+ has notched up users like crazy, 10 million at last count, though that is because Gmail is a convenient entry and network expansion gateway. But with the host of other services like YouTube and Picasa, the base is already set for the men at Mountainview to accomplish that goal.

In all probability, both networks will learn to co-exist, with Facebook being ahead thanks to its first-mover advantage. So, more Bond and Bourne and less Batman and Superman. We do feel bad for Superman, though.

©Entrepreneur August 2011

Tags:
Facebook, Google, IPO, killer, social networking, Zynga