Google Plus vs. Facebook.

In a world, where people are into excessive social networking, Google introduces yet another social networking site to add up to the mayhem, Google Plus! It is said to have given the most popular social networking site, Facebook, a pretty good competition. People are now confused whether they should be in the blues of Facebook or roam around in circles on Google Plus.

Google Plus, to quite an extent, is a mixture of Facebook and Twitter. (Another widely used social networking site for miro-blogging.) The concept of adding up friends in your circles and having yourself in others’ circles is quite similar to the concept of followers in Twitter. Also, Google Plus looks very much like Facebook minus the advertisements.

There has been a great emphasis on the concept of circles in Google Plus. This concept of friends in circles has provided users with an easy and uncomplicated way to categorize friends and also to share selected updates with the selected set of friends that you choose. We can do pretty much the same in Facebook but this whole process is clumsy there and is definitely not as easy as Google Plus.

All about the circles.

This whole new circle based posting is reducing public posts to very closed circles thus there will be very less wall posts visible to us, but it can be a perfect tool for a close friends’ group to have social interaction, share photos, videos, etc. But then, if we come to think of it, we did not use Facebook or Orkut to keep in touch with our very close friends alone. It’s more of a news page of what is happening to ‘all’ our friends and who has commented what. The moment this news is cut off, I feel there is nothing else that engages us in this site. Over the time, everyone will start putting posts within closed circles and your wall activity will be filled by only very few posts posted by your close friends. The concept of randomly seeing what “other 100+ friends” are up to won’t exist. This may lead to the activity going down gradually. But then, at the same time, it also gives you the freedom to share a particular post with just your friends and not your teachers or family conveniently.

Another good thing about circles is that nobody can see which circle you’ve added them to. So, you may easily add someone to ‘Annoying People’ circle and they won’t even have a clue about it!

Some more features.

Google plus has this excellent feature of editing a post. An error or typo in any of your posts can easily be edited without even anyone knowing about it. You don’t have to re-post it, it updates automatically.

The +1 button of Google Plus is a clone of the ‘Like’ button of Facebook.

The graphics of Google Plus is also very interesting. What I found the most interesting is the way a circle vibrates and falls down and rolls to the right of the screen and then vanishes when you delete a circle. Try it in case you haven’t!

Facebook video chat is indeed an amazing feature that Mark Zuckerberg introduced but Google Plus’ video chat sure beats it. Hangouts on Google Plus provides us with a group video chat where we can video chat with multiple friends and we can also see youtube videos together with friends!

Google Plus does not have any options to write to someone directly unlike Facebook. Facebook lets us write directly on each other’s wall and also, it has pretty good private messaging tools.

Hopefully, there are still many more new and innovative features which are yet to arrive. Till then the Google Plus vs. Facebook arguments will continue. All in all, there are few features which are exclusive to Facebook and few which are exclusive to Google Plus. So, which do you think will grab your attention more?

Peace.