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Can Google circle (+1) beat Facebook

Human Being is called the 'THE SOCIAL ANIMAL'. Ever since he is born he has been living in communities and has formed societies. Within these societies people follow lots of customs and traditions. They always try to remain in contact with each other in every possible way.

With the evolution of human understanding and expansion of communities, different communities have come in contact with each other. Weather it is for business or for any other reason. They have felt the necessity of communication and understanding. This gave birth to new languages and methods of communications.

In early days long before the invention of electricity, methods of communication were very few and slow. But with invention of electricity electronic communication devices like telephone communication has become possible with lightning speed. Now what anyone can ask for more? But with invention of computers and there combination with telephony gave birth to INTERNET. With help of internet human (the social animal) have formed internet societies. So that they can share there experiences about there culture, traditions, technology. Thus internet forums are formed to know each other very well.

Now all this practices gave birth to social networking sites. Some of the popular are Orkut, Myspace, Facebook etc. Large numbers of companies are involved in this profitable business of providing social networking services and community forum services to the users world wide through World Wide Web.

So there is large competition among these companies to make large profit by running and providing social networking services to the users world wide more efficiently. So this involves lot of planning and implementing the strategies and counterstrategies. By designing these social networking sites more user friendly companies try to attract large number of users.

Facebook a very popular social networking site confounded by Mark Elliot Zuckerbug and his classmates Dustin Maskovitz, Eduardo Soverin and Chris Hughes in 2004 while they were students at Harvard University. This networking site became so popular that it have highest number of active users, about 750 million world wide as of July 2011.

Now the question arises that why Facebook is so popular? In any networking site people remain in contact wit there friends, relatives etc. But what Facebook offers more is that people can share there views. By uploading there photos they can share there memories. And one can get popular if there views are appreciated by other and they hit the 'like' button. Plus users can chat with there friends instantly.

But as I said earlier there is tremendous competition among these companies to make large profit by attracting maximum number of users world wide. Now Google a software giant company has taken some crucial steps to attract maximum internet users across the globe.

Google is an American international public corporation in software sector. Google was started as a search engine (a research project) in January 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brine as PhD students at Stanford University in California. Today the company offers online productivity software such as GMail(email service) and social networking tools including Orkut, application such as Google Chrome (a web browser), Picasa (a photo organizer and editor), Google talk (instant messaging application). Notably Google leads the development of Android mobile operating system.

Now recently Google launched there social networking service 'GOOGLE PLUS' abbreviated as G+ Also written as GOOGLE (+1) CIRCLES. Now 'Google Plus or Google (+1)' integrates social services such as 'Google Profiles' and 'Google Buzz' and introduced new services- CIRCELS, HANGOUTS, SPARKS, and HUDDLES. It is Google's biggest attempt to rival the social network Facebook.

Now there is only one ultimate question raised by many users, that is – Can GOOGLE (+1) CIRCLES beat the FACEBOOK? The primary advantage for Facebook is that it has huge user database. That means people can find there friends and relatives in Facebook. In order to win, Google Plus has to offer many features better than Facebook and also bring all our friends in it.

Well in my opinion I will give Google Plus a try for some of the basic strong reasons
(1). First of all Google Plus is from Google. I trust Google they have been providing with lots of great services including search engines, Adsense, GMail as discussed earlier.
(2). Google provides better privacy than Facebook. In Facebook they made it user's responsibility to figure out and secure any private information the want to keep confidential. I believe the social networking sites should do it the other way. If I am novice my information should remain private and confidential until I figure out and make it public.
(3). Google Plus gives more control on who sees what, but Facebook have just limited control. Google Plus brings the concept of 'circles' where user can create various circles of friends, relatives, office etc. So users can choose which circle can see there messages.
(4). Google Plus is integrated with other Google products, but Facebook is not and Google has large number of products that are used by millions of users and Google Plus is well integrated with many of these.
(5). Google Plus offers much better collaboration, Facebook depends on third party applications. Google Plus comes with video chat and many other collaboration tools directly build into it. And collaboration in Facebook is limited to only text messages, photo sharing and chat within Facebook pages.
(6). One demerit in Google Plus is that, Facebook offers few features like pages and groups. Which can be used to promote your business or use a personal blog? Google Plus does not have this built in feature, but in future it may be integrated with Google groups, a much more powerful and established group discussion platform.
But as we discussed earlier to survive the competition new strategies and innovative ideas are implemented by social networking companies. But today I see Google Plus is winning the race

Deepak Kailash Patra