The World Wide Web has been a busy place last weekend with limited invites of Google's brand new social networking site, GooglePlus, landing up in the hands of a few lucky geeks. Some enterprising ones even sold these sought after invites on Ebay. The larger question everyone is asking is will this be a real competitor to Facebook?
It is in a private beta phase right now, which means one may not have hands on experience with it yet, but invites are reaching people's inboxes.
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Google Plus' layout is similar to Facebook's, so one many not have any trouble finding your way around. However, the Facebook resemblance only stops at looks. There are lots of hidden gems with
Plus.
The problem with Facebook and Twitter is that whatever you share is broadcasted to your entire friend list, which is not always what you want. Of course, you can make groups on Facebook and lists on Twitter, but the experience is largely inconvenient.
Google plus tackles this issue with Circles — you can literally drag and drop people into Circles. You can control whether you're sharing with a circle or individual or with everyone, giving you the flexibility of sharing whatever you want with whoever you want.
While Circles make sharing easier, they're not the best part of the GooglePlus. The killer feature is called Sparks — it has Google Alerts for your Plus page. It collates all the photos, videos, blog posts, news about topics of your choice.
The Huddle feature lets you start a conversation with a group of friends and Hangout lets you video chat with up to 10 friends from your Google plus page. This is a game changing feature and it is expected that Facebook will try and come up with a competing service soon. It works fine on a 512Kbps connection.
As for photos and videos, Google Plus automatically syncs with your Picasa web albums, giving you access to all your photos on your profile. Alternatively, you can drag and drop photos and videos from your computer to your profile. You can also upload photos and videos from your android phone and click +1 if you like something.
Google Plus looks like an extremely promising social networking project from Google, and it looks like we can start counting the days of Facebook's solo reign in this space.
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