Google goes after Facebook with Google+

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 29 June 2011 13:32

IT Industry - Strategy

Google has unveiled its ambitious play for the social networking market, Google+ with dominant player Facebook firmly in its sights; and according to one Google watcher the project is key to Google's future.

Google+ was announced in a blog posting by Vic Gundotra, senior vice president, engineering, along with a handful of videos offering tantalising glimpses of Google+ features and functionality.

Other than that, there were few specifics revealed. Google+ is available now as an Android app and via the mobile web, and soon via the App Store. However, during the start-up phase, participation will be by invitation only.

In his blog, Gundotra make clear, without naming names, that Google has Facebook in its sights. "Among the most basic of human needs is the need to connect with others'¦[And] today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools," he says.

"In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it. We'd like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project."

More specifically, he claims that one feature of Google+, +Circles, goes beyond the limitations of Facebook. "Not all relationships are created equal. So in life we share one thing with college buddies, another with parents and almost nothing with our boss. The problem is that today's online services turn friendship into fast food - wrapping everyone in 'friend' paper - and sharing really suffers'¦

"Every online conversation (with over 100 'friends') is a public performance, so we often share less because of stage fright'¦We all define 'friend' and 'family' Differently'¦but we lose this nuance online. In light of these shortcomings we asked ourselves, 'What do people actually do?' And we didn't have to search far for the answer. People in fact share selectively all the time -with their circles'¦So we did the only thing that made sense: we brought Circles to software."

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