Google Plus

Finally the stage has set for the next biggest 'Clash of the Titans' involving Google and Facebook. Its seems like Google has no plans to give up, even after repeatedly failing with products targeted towards the collaboration and social networking fronts like Orkut, Buzz, Wave, Friend Connect and Latitude. 

I believe by this time Google had learned the tricks of the trade the hard way from their past failures; this should be the reason why Vic Gundotra had decided to take his brain child's(Google Plus) maiden voyage right into turbulent channel where Facebook had been ruling for the past couple of years without any rivals as such.

Its seems like the Google+ is the fastest product I had ever seen to go from beta to live in a matter of months. If you are a frequent Googler (I mean who uses Google Search) possibly you might have noticed some new icons with "+1" in search results and the main google search page's top link color changed to something dark. All these were the stepping stones towards the next major outcome from Google under the title "Google Plus".

So for the first time when I logged into Google Plus, to me it felt more or less like a revamped Facebook. Everything seemed to be like Facebook except for the circles feature. This was my very first impression, but the moment I started exploring G+, it seemed like there was something more out there than what I saw at first.

The 'Circles' feature in G+ is going to be the most applauded feature in G+. This pretty cool feature lets you to group your friends into circles, there by isolating the activities inside the circles from others. Without this, just think how annoying it would be let your family members or boss viewing your posts you had with your close friends. This bring you a whole lot possibilities to restrict posts from viewed by others. Definitely a boon to those privacy loving chaps. I would say this is one thing Facebook is dearly missing, you can't hide any posts from any of your members, in such cases one had to depend on messages that too wouldn't work if the number of people you are trying to contact is pretty long. So by this time Facebook might have started working on something similar.

The very next feature I liked the most is the 'Sparks'. This is more or less a kind  of subscribing to a feed, but here the catch is you need to just key in your area of interest and the rest is taken care of by G+. All your 'Sparks' show up in the page like small article snippets fetched from popular sites.

Google has taken due care to get their G+ into the mobile platforms with Android users being the first to get a hands on experience with G+ on their mobiles, while for iPhone users the G+ apps are still under development, which might hit the apps store in a month or so.

So whats in for developers?. As per Google, they had put developers on wait mode as said in this page. Once the APIs are out, its going to a shower of G+ apps. The entrepreneurs are keenly watching this space on how to profit from Googles new initiative.

By the way here's something which I was expecting with G+.

There's no way you could restrict others from adding you to their circle. What I did to get over this was; I created a Circle named 'Strangers' and moved those to that circle, now all the strangers together in a secluded room of their own. To me the Facebook way of friend request is better than this one, which gives you the choice to accept or deny those requests.

The fonts really look bigger when compared to the once in Facebook. This bigger fonts eats up the screen space, ending up with lot many scrollable content and only few in the visible area.

Then the other feature I was looking out was setting 'Disable Reshare' by default in specific 'Circles', which would prevent from sharing the contents of my post in his\her Circle.

The very feature they had missed out is integration with Google Calendar and Google Docs which unfortunately I couldn't find any options for this in my G+ page. Just think of the how nice it would be to have Calendars and Docs shared with some of your members in a specific circle.

To conclude, I would say Google isn't that late into this Social networking arena dominated by major players like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn et al. Even now Social networking is in its infancy like Internet was in 90's, there's still lot to explore and innovate in Social Networking arena with more and more people using the Internet as never before. Well wait and watch how things are going to turn out this time for Google and also don't forget to tap out the vast business opportunities laying ahead in this sphere.