India Internet News
Better Experiences With Google+ Circles And Hangouts
15 July 2011
The real giant has made it once again, with the Google+ Project. The recent revolt, it's fun, easy to use and gives you an experience of next generation.
It is a bit older than 2 weeks, in beta stage, and still has 2 million people worldwide. Until now, it has crashed 2 times because a lot of users were logged on at a time. Its common invites are being sold on EBay.com for 99 cents (Rs. 44). After a week of launch, Google’s market value raised by $20 billion. If you didn't heard or read about it, you might as well have been living under a rock. Welcome to the newest revolt in social networking, Google+ Project.
Until today, Google's social networking efforts got comments like “ahem” or an indifferent “so what?”. Google Wave has become nothing but a techies nest, Google Buzz halted buzzing after the few days of launch, and Orkut was unable to attract anyone except sleazy lurkers. Everyone falls out of the online radar, and did not missed much.
However Google+ has another way of dealing with social networking. It is entertaining and delivers a bit more than Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Orkut and other social networks in place. Google states that it tends to be a social layer being at the highest position on the search engine and all its products, so that your Web experience becomes one seamless, built on the social Web experience.
The site rotates around Circles - that are definite groups of friends, family, acquaintances and people you want to track. You can create, edit and delete Circles with a simple drag-and-drop function. A post (@gstrompolos) states that the experience of putting the people you know in Circles like playing an endless game of solitaire with your contacts. Visually, that is what the drag-and-drop feels like.
Each time you update the Stream status (similar to Facebook News feed, but with cleaner design), you can select who can see that status. You can film anything from a link, a video, change your location or a picture over Stream and see the Streams according to the groups you have done. In addition to this, you can disable resharing and make sure that the status message doesn’t go beyond the Circle or the person you intended.
It helps you to manage your online groups, view, share and discuss with them without anyone else in other Circles to know about it. And it makes it easier than both the Facebook and Twitter lists.
We were not over-reacting when we said Google+ tries to integrate all the online concepts you're used to from Google and other online spaces you can easily get used to other features. Like Sixth Sense or StumbleUpon, the popular websites that suggest new things to read based on what you like already, Google+ Sparks is an integrated search engine that helps you find things to suit your interests, and then share them seamlessly with your friends.
It uses Picasa, the famous online photo service of Google, to upload and tag images with a simple drag-and-drop technique. Plus, the Google+ user may also use an unlimited amount of Google cloud space for pictures and videos on YouTube. It also provides geotags for pictures, status updates and links that have become popular with websites like Foursquare. There are some usual social networking inventions you are used to from Facebook—notifications, pressing the +1 button to Like something, or pinging someone in a status message by typing their name with a “+” sign before it. Huddles is a group-SMS feature—so you can text a particular Circle if you want to invite them for a function, event or just coffee.
Another feature we like is Hangout - an online group video chat concept. You can group-chat with upto 10 friends at a time. The camera switches automatically depending on who is talking. Everyone can even view and search videos on YouTube at a time. When a video starts, the group chat mutes everyone by default but you can always press Push to Talk to voice your thoughts again. Isn't that brilliant?
Google must be concentrating on merging all their services with Google+ social experience. All Google services - such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, YouTube, Android, Google Maps, Picasa, Blogger, Google Search - are merged under one login ID and with a social experience covering all of them. This might only change your online experience.
However there is a threat in all this things. Google has an intention which is pretty open. So far, Google has been the kingmaker of the online advertising space and plans for Google+ Project are not different. It is already planning the launch of Google+ for companies in a month or so. Unnecessarily, Google would want users to spend more time on Google services (and Google+ is tempting enough), only to serve them with ads.
This means, you are allowing Google to lead your online life by giving it more details about you through this social network - your real name, interests, friends, things or people you want to avoid and the place where you stay. To be honest, networking sites like Facebook too gathered users personal details.
Will Google utilize this additional details to make a personality chart for you and deliver you more ads? However nothing comes for free, don’t you already know that?