Google+

I'll be the first to admit that much of my excitement over Google+ (free) was a result of Facebook fatigue. The social network that has become the social network may have already peaked in popularity, leaving little ground to explore. No Facebook stone has been left unturned. With the mass appeal of any product comes the desire for something different, fresh blood, an underdog.

Powered by Google, Google+ is hardly an underdog, though Google's dismal social networking record means it's not a shoe-in, either. In the giant shadow of Facebook, Google+ may be the only other player that stands a chance of being noticed. That's not to discount Twitter by any stretch, but there's no denying that head-to-head, feature-for-feature, the site that Google+ intends to beat is Facebook.

How Google+ Stacks Up
While not a direct clone, Google+ very clearly imitates Facebook?although the more I use Google+, the more resemblance I see to Twitter, too. The primary way you interact with Google+ is by posting messages ("status updates" in Facebookese) and watching and responding to the content that other people post. In Facebook, these updates roll into a news feed. In Google+, it's a stream.

Like Facebook, Google+ lets you share photos and videos. Google gives you virtually unlimited storage: 1GB, but photos 2,048 by 2,048 pixels and smaller, and videos 15 minutes or shorter don't count toward that limit. Unless you're seriously into photography, most of your online photos should be smaller than 2,048 by 2,048 pixels anyhow.

One elemental way Google+ differs from Facebook is in how "friendship" is defined, and here's where Google+] starts to resemble Twitter. In Facebook, friends must have a mutual relationship. If someone wants to be your friend and see your updates in their news feed, you have to agree to a mutual friendship. Google+ works more like Twitter, in which anyone can follow you regardless of whether you follow back, although you do have the option of blocking unwanted followers in both Twitter and Google+. Additionally, both Twitter and Google+ can notify you (or you can disable the notifications) when new people follow you. Links to the followers' profile pages help you determine if you would rather block the users.

What You Can't Get in Google+
What Google+ lacks, nearly a month after its debut, is an element of play, some app-within-an-app or section of the site that welcomes creativity and imagination. Facebook embraces apps, from games like Farmville, Mafia Wars, and Words with Friends, to the Twitter app that lets you synch the two social networks. And as much as Google purports to be "open" (Android, Chrome), with Google+ it isn't, denying third-party developers creative freedom to build something interesting and new on top of the platform. Sure, if third-party apps were allowed into Google+, the site would creep ever closer to becoming a Facebook clone, but undoubtedly, we'd see some innovation, too, particularly because there's room to explore how Google+ could interact with Gmail, Gmail chat, YouTube, and other popular Google services, differently than how it does now.

The only pioneering element that Google+ seems to have implemented successfully so far is Circles, or clusters of friends that you group by design. With Circles, you get to survey your entire list of friends and categorize them into groups. You can name the Circles whatever you want, such as "family," "co-workers," or "annoying people from high school." Your connections can't see the Circles you create, so they don't know how you've classified them. You can also categorize people into more than one circle, so your sister might be both "family" and "close friends." Circles are visual and intuitive, with a drag-and-drop creation mechanism and thumbnail images of profile images popping up whenever you want to be reminded whom you put in which Circle.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/OXV5b_OVRcM/0,2817,2389224,00.asp

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