Is so much fuss warranted over Google Plus?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 02 July 2011 11:41

Your IT - Home IT

With Google's Wave and Buzz efforts having suffered a bit of buzzkill, Google is waving goodbye to its previous efforts and saying hello to what it hopes will be a real plus for social networkers.

Watch out, Facebook, that other great player with privacy issues is gunning for your No.1 position in the social networking stakes, and this time, Facebook might have to face up to some real competition.

With MySpace having fallen flat on its face in the face of the Facebook face-off, the next big challenger, Google, is facing up to what could well be a final tilt at social networking supremacy.

But what is Google Plus, or Google+ as Google has dubbed it?

It's Google's Facebook clone, with better groups, more private messaging and video chat, along with the promise of social gaming and much more to come, but it has only 'sort-of' arrived.

Yes, Google+ is here for a select few beta 'field trial' testers, and those lucky few who not only got an invite from the initial testers but were able to get in before Google shut the membership application system down.

However, for everyone else, Google+ is still unavailable, with Google+ invites so popular (at the moment) that they're even on sale on eBay.

Of course, it isn't the first time that Google has had IT techies, geeks, nerds and webophiles in a frenzy for one of its invites - Gmail was the first time I can remember Google generating a massive buzz, with Google Wave the next time an invite wave wove its web of anticipatory magic around the world.

Continued on page two, please read on!