Can Google Plus be the new Face of Social Networking?

Google was coming up with a new social network called Circles, ReadWriteWeb had reported on 13th March 2011, and Google had denied it.

Yesterday Google announced the launch of Google Plus, a product they claim aims to fix the broken online sharing that exists today. Google Circles is a small part of it.

The only part that competes with Facebook.

And the best part.

Circles lets you segregate your friends into circles, thereby helping you create distinct sub-networks and share selective stuff with selective people. This is a feature I direly miss on Facebook when I want to share, for example, a raunchy video with my classmates but cannot because I have my uncles and aunts and parents on my network as well. Or talk about job openings but cannot because I don't want my employer and colleagues to see that.

Maintaining circles might be a tedious job for some if you have 'friends' overlapping more than one circle. I hope Google has taken care of it while designing their Circles so that we have a Venn-diagram-like arrangement:

And you do not need to look for and invite people. Circles will scan your contacts and prompt you to befriend people and designate them in circles. Facebook has apps doing so for you, Plus has that in-built.

Other than Circles, Google + comes with a host of other apps, Sparks, Hangouts, Instant Upload and Huddle. Sparks is a similar to a feed aggregator, and based on what Google knows about you from your email, feed reader, browsing patterns, and now Circles, makes recommendations on articles you might like. Google Reader already does a part of it.

Hangouts is like one of those chat rooms Yahoo used to have 10 years ago. Google has added video chat and restricted rooms to your friends. Though I did not read about it, but I hope you should be able to hangout only in a particular Circle.

Instant Upload is a useful tool for your phone—it syncs up your phone's album with the cloud and then you can choose whom to share with and what. I strongly believe there are a dozen Android apps in the market already doing that.

Huddle is a group chat thing, which is as old as chatting. Combining it with a circle means you do not have to invite people to group chat. Not much of a value addition. You'd rather post it on your wall for that circle and people can reply.

Another project Google isn't advertising with Plus is Google Takeout, which lets you archive and download all your data from Circles, Profiles, Contacts, and Picasa in one big scoop. Against Google principles of having data offline, but Takeout might impress some old-schoolers.

Converting Facebook devotees to Google Plus might be a mammoth task. The rapid growth of Facebook to 500 million users worldwide from a few Harvard students in 7 years cannot be undone by another social networking product from Google whose Orkut was crestfallen not so long ago.

There are FB users for whom the internet is equivalent to Facebook. There are people who never used a computer or internet in their lives (e.g. people from the older generation) but Facebook was a compelling reason for them to do so. The Facebook 'Like' button on sites and the Facebook login being used as an open id have ensured FB has reached far and inside. Google has the +1 button and open id, but not many people use the Google open id and not many would have heard of +1.

Not to talk of the millions of apps and games written for Facebook. Google Plus does not have a place for that. At least not yet.

I can draw a clear analogy between this and what Microsoft is trying to do with Office 365. Google wants to break the loyalties of Facebook users showing them all the data they have about them from their emails and searches. Microsoft did the same thing the same day when they launched Office 365 and demonstrated cloud compatibilities with their MS Office products. I had argued yesterday that MS will not be able to convert all the Google Docs loyalists to Office 365; the same reasoning holds true for FB to Google Plus conversions as well.

Let us just hope Google+ is something out-of-the-world, or it fails miserably, the way Google Wave did. It is already difficult sharing the same stuff on Facebook, Buzz, Twitter, and Yammer. If some people move and some do not, I do not want another place to communicate with my friend circles.

For now, I want to try Google Plus out. Anyone out there who has invites want to use one on me?