Is Google Plus a Facebook clone ? - Netvani

0 Comment(s) | Read 652 Time(s)

Google recently launched another of its Social networking experiment, i.e, Google plus (+). Rather brave of Google to do this after a series of flop shows like Orkut, Wave, Buzz etc. The website has not yet been made totally public. People who get invites from existing users are the only ones who can create an account for the time being. Once you join, the first thing you notice is that it’s a no-surprise. Most of the components are identical to Facebook with the interface showing glimpses of Twitter also.

You can see the exact clones of items like Walls, Newsfeeds, Notifications, Like button, Share menu (Photo, Status, Video, Link) etc. The only difference being in the names. In the same way, the Facebook lists have been called as Plus circles on Google plus.

Google Plus pays more attention to Circles and Privacy settings. An easy to use drag and drop interface makes the categorization of contacts comfortable. Now the pages are advertisement free. Another good thing is that your Google contacts are automatically added to your Circles and you can even import contacts from other e-mail services like Hotmail, Yahoo etc. Privacy settings are simpler than Facebook which makes it easy for you to decide what you want to share with whom. Your Picassa account is linked with Plus profile to share the albums and photos with your friends and circles.

The best part is the Hangout feature of Google plus. With this feature, you can only have simple text chats but also Voice and Video chat, Group Video chat and streaming.

Being diplomatic, I would rather not comment on the success or failure of Google plus. But I would like to state that this social networking experiment is far better than the earlier flop shows put up by Google which has been looking to sweep the social networking sector.