Yesterday, I felt like a freshman in college again. Not because I started re-watching the second season of The O.C. (OMG Marissa’s chair throw!), but because I joined a new social network. But this time around, the network didn’t involve the words “face” or “book.” (Or “Zuckerberg” or “Friend” or even “a billion dollars.”) Instead, it was Google+, the search engine’s latest answer to Facebook.
You may recall Google trying out Buzz a year ago, a program that enabled users to post updates similar to Facebook. Unfortunately, that seemingly nifty idea turned out to be an uninspired one, and the program died a less dignified death than Friendster. But Google+ is a far more logical competitor to Facebook — with a set-up that’s very similar to our favorite online distraction, Google+ allows users to scroll through friends’ profiles, post status updates, and comment on friends’ pictures and postings.
So what makes it different — and more of a draw — than Facebook? Its “circles,” which enable users to separate their friends into several different groups: Friends, Family, Acquaintances, Work, or anything custom-made. Tired of scrolling through your old high school friends’ inane statuses on Facebook? The circles allow you to funnel them all into a category. You can search a news feed pertaining to each of those circles — in case you only want to see what’s up with your closest friends — and, perhaps more importantly, you can post your own information giving only certain circles access. So while your friends can laugh at a picture of you shotgunning beers at a kegger, Aunt Sally will never have to see it. Such privacy settings are far easier to grasp than Facebook’s and, you know, more private too.
Plus (or should I say +?), it looks pretty.
What do you think of Google+, PopWatchers? (For those of you curious to start using, you can join here.) And could this possibly threaten Facebook as the Internet’s best social networking site? Based on how much time I spent perusing Google+ last night (the most I’ve spent on a social networking site since I joined Facebook back in college… and that’s with only three of my friends using it now), I’d say Mark Zuckerberg has reason to be afraid.
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Do you have Facebook fatigue?
Facebook will add that feature within a month. Nothing to be afraid of…
No, FB already has it. It’s called lists and I’ve been using them to separate people since I joined LAST YEAR!
exactly. calm down, EW.
It IS odd to have someone review this Google thing who admits she barely uses Facebook.
Haha, indeed. I use lists constantly! Facebook still wins for me…
Faebook let every e-mail address to join. With Google+, they force you to get a gmail. I’ve been using hotmail since 92, my gmail has only been for searches, calendar, blogger etc…
Google+ is the new Googlewave. It’ll be gone before most people even realize it’s there.
No, Google+ is the new Facebook, which is the new MySpace graveyard.
How much is Google paying you to say that? Do you already have an account there where you can talk to yourself because your friends are too bored with social networks to bother setting up a new one?
How much is Facebook paying you to say that?
$1,000,000,000
That seems really cool, but I just don’t see all the people moving over from Facebook for this. If anything it’ll probably only end up inspiring Facebook to do something similar with the circles leaving Google + in the dust.
Will be interesting to see where this goes. I know a ton of people that don’t like Facebook (privacy policies, sharing personal data, etc.), but don’t want to give up the services it provides. Now there may be an alternative. I remember when Facebook came out everyone said it would never overtake MySpace. We know how that turned out.
How lazy can you actually be that you don’t group your friends and family in groups within FB so that those “embarrassing” photos won’t go to the family? Not moving to Google+ any time soon.
I don’t even know how to do that, and from looking at my privacy settings on FB, it doesn’t seem like there’s a way.
It’s called lists. I don’t use them but I hear they’re nothing new.
When are people going to get some real friends, and stop keeping themselves isolated with technology and social networks?
I know right!
THANK YOU! I’m personally SO done with social networking. I never even had a Facebook profile, I had in another social networking site, but haven’t checked it in years!
i think am gona enjoy this…
The difference in privacy rules is enough to make lots of people like G+.
l have no friends.
So basically the whole reason to join Google+ is so I can separate people into different sub categories? Try again Google.
Yeah, you can already put your friends in lists on Facebook and then use that to control what you see in your newsfeed. Or if you have old high school friends posting inane crap, you can hide them. Nothing new here, but nice try Google.
I am lost what is point of these
People seem to expect a mass exodus from fb, as that seems the tech industry trend, but I think fb will endure. Myspace died because it was a clunky interface, and it allowed so many customizations that it was annoying it visit people’s pages without being bombarded by their stupid background images, terrible music and wacky dimensions to their statuses and things.
Fb took a streamlined, simplified, universal approach to social networking. (And had a wall, of course).
At this point, all my friends are on fb, all my photos are on fb, all the captions at there and all the comments are there from friends/family which adds the memory of the event itself. You get emotionally invested in your fb page after a year or two simply because it does become a document of your life. To go somewhere else, I’d basically have to start over again.
For most of us, we never used or interacted with Myspace like we did Fb. It was easy to forget about it because nothing really tied us to it, but even if a slightly better social networking services comes along, I gotta be honest, I just simply don’t want to leave fb.
And I think tons of people agree with me.
wow. you sound like all those old myspace users. seriously, anyone “emotionally invested” in facebook needs to chill and realize the scary hold it has on them.
Yet another way for the anti-Christ to find where I’m hiding.
I’m using G+ in a trial version and have to say as much the circle idea seems nothing special in comparison to Fakebook, it’s much MUCH easier to group people thanks to simply drag&drop objects and the whole privacy matter is so much easier to set up than with FB where you basically have to crawl in the deepest corners of the system. Above that you can invite your friends that are not/and don’t need to be a member of G+ and finally, G+ really looks so tidy and well-organised! Could be a real tough competitor!