Sunday, March 24, 2013
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| Google Plus Cirlces |
The intents of Google to monopolize the web world is not something Google has ever tried to hide. Every now and then, a new product is released by this Mountain View web giant. Google picks on a web industry leader and builds a similar, even better application to compete and conquer. Google+, or Google Plus, is no exception.
Goople+ (often abbreviated as G+ or +1) is a social networking service launched, after several years of hiccups and delays, in June 28, 2011 to mainly compete with Facebook. It quickly became popular among social networkers. It has now more than 400,000,000 registered users just within less than 2 years of existence. It is constantly increasing its popularity day by day.
G+ is a more natural, secure social network
More intuitive than Facebook, G+ aims, according to Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering for Google, to develop the online sharing and make it as natural, rich and nuanced as our real world interactions. People don’t interact with everyone the same way. They tend to be more open to people they like and trust. They tend to put people into certain cirles of trust and share their very personal things accordingly. Don’t you?
Online social interaction lacked this feature before the arrival of G+. Most social networks don’t grant their users much control over access to their information and updates.
Unlike its competitor’s wall, I mean Facebook of course, where the profile updates and all postings are visible by default to all contacts, Google+ impressive interface is well built for the user to better publish the information he/she wishes to disseminate and avoid unfortunate mishaps. I believe that what stands Google out of the competition is the importance it gives to privacy. The Google+ privacy feature is centered around Circles and your ability to choose which Circles can view your information. Go through your privacy settings to understand what people are seeing from your profile and who's seeing it.
Generally speaking, Google+ is not that different from other services in terms of purpose and function. They all are used to share photos, videos and articles and keep in touch with friends online. But what makes Google+ different from the others is how technology is used and tailored to meet what users actually need to better socialize online.
In brief, Google Plus is awesome for the following features:
- Circles: Users can see updates of their contacts from their “circles” through the "Stream" (Stream is quite similar to the "news feed" on Facebook). They can use “Circles” to organize their followers as well as those they follow themselves. You just click a Circle in the left of the screen to set the type of contacts circle to see your posts. You can limit the amount of incoming information by clicking specific Circles. What is revolutionary in this service that other networks lack is the ability to drag contacts directly from your address book messaging, Gmail, in different circles and arrange them according to the importance of the relationship: friend, family, knowledge, other. Users can create as many "circles" that we want to bring people together in a collaborative task and a common interest. They also have the possibility to share photos, links and videos with one or more circles.
- Real-time Stream: With Google+, no need to refresh the stream page over and over to see the new updates when posted. New postings and comments automatically show up at the top of the stream. It’s really time-saving.
- Hangouts: Hangouts simply means hanging online with a group of friends “Circles” of your chosen through group video chat. You can chat with up to ten people at a time. You have control over who can see or hear you. You can have secret chat with some members of the Hangout if you want to have a private talk with someone while others are talking. You can use YouTube service in your hangout. It’s an interesting feature. A member can create up to ten "Video-Bubbles".
