Google Plus: First Take!

Google launched Google+ on 28^th June, the much anticipated under the wraps (for a long time) social networking service. This new service will aim to take on Facebook, another attempt to create a social ecosystem from the house of Google. The pressure seems to be mounting on Google in terms of time spent and pageviews – on which Facebook is ahead of Google by healthy margins as per ComScore and other online audience measurement systems. Google has to find its feet in the social space, and this is practically the third attempt after Orkut and Buzz.

The overall product should be called “Facebook plus” rather than “Google plus” since most features can be good additions to current Facebook product. There is nothing revolutionary about the product, the core features are:

1. Ability to create groups of friends or allow friends to be grouped in customized or canned groups like friends, classmates, family, acquaintances etc. This feature is called circles and has a nice drag and drop feature plus some cool graphics.
2. The next feature is sparks (content discovery), which is the ability to add interests and get content on your interests. You can add any interest like “photography” and you will be served articles, videos etc on that topic and then you can share (and discuss) them with your friends.
3. Another feature is for group chat called Hangout. It is like creating a chat room on the fly and you will have a status of “hanging out”. It can take 10 people at a time and allows video chat.
4. Then there are set of mobile features – instant upload of images and video, locational services (posts/spot your friends on geography) and a group messaging service called huddle.

These features are positioned like new and cool features – but they are available on internet in one way or another. And these features are currently not available on Facebook. These features can be helpful if they are available on Facebook as layers of applications which you can add. Therefore I called the product Facebook plus earlier. 

I would love to see some competition for Facebook, but I think Google missed the trick out here. I mean you need to have friends to put them in groups (circles). Google got into problems of privacy for Buzz and Orkut and most likely will not push this product in your Gmail. Then how will the traction begin? That is the key question – the social ecosystem requires concurrent users – who become friends or are already friends.

The official Google post is promoting privacy and how this product will help protect that (by ability to share different things with different groups of people). There are various settings available including how your profile may be visible differently to different people. Finally there is data liberation tab which helps you download the data from Google plus (another cloud storage coming?).

Overall Google plus is collection of some of the bright ideas and some need gaps from Facebook. The big ticket item is privacy and the big question – if you want to stay private what are you doing on a public social network? Why grow your network? Why friends of friends become friends and there is a chain reaction?

Google has taken all of that for granted – that users will come and join (right now Google plus is open for select people), they will make friends or connect with old friends, family etc and then will use all these features to secure privacy, showcase differently to different people, have random video chats and use mobile features. But the first step is the toughest step in social networking that users will come and connect to each other – all these features come after that.

But these are my first reactions and Google may have a solid networking strategy which they may unleash once the product opens completely.

Will you leave Facebook for these cool features or will you wait till your friends migrate there?