Social Networking battle now goes live..! Google+ versus Facebook

+2 now! I have done it myself personally gogogo to +OVER 9000

Thinking of trying it and found an opportunity to do so. +4 now.

Cheers

Steve, no need to put your toe in the water, still you can do that. jus give it a try

Today morning i saw the post in which it was mentioned Google is lunching social networking site. Currently it is very difficult to challenge Facebook as it is top position in social networking sites but if Google plus come up with good features then surly it will give a bad time to facebook.

facebook and twitter have been blocked. I can access them. But sometimes i can access them through a proxy,hehe

I want to try it, but I need to get hold of an invite, and I'm not so desperate to try it that I'm going to buy one from eBay or beg from strangers.

I think the invites system is what made gmail great but also what killed Wave and is going to disadvantage this.

For Gmail, the scarcity of invites meant they were desirable - but, crucially, it was an email provider, which meant you could drop right into it and start emailing other people regardless of whether or not they had also been able to obtain an invite.

For Wave, I remember getting my invite, being excited, logging in, familiarising, and then... Time passed. A lizard scuttled under a rock. A tumbleweed rolled past. Only one other person I knew had been invited and they weren't online that day. So I logged out and did something else. By the time enough of my contacts had been invited, the excitement had dissipated - the new invitees weren't super-keen to try it out, and very few of the early adopters could still be bothered.

I don't understand it. Google can hardly be struggling to scrape up the money for another server.

So, I got an invite and got in...

They want full names, and the rumbling is that they're going to be strict on people who try to use screen names instead. That doesn't make me happy. I'm content to give Google my full name, and to have it appear on my emails, but I'd really prefer my surname to be obscured from Strangers On The Internet.

The other problem this causes is that those of us who are used to thinking of our friends as usernames like "sjr4x4" and "garde" are staring at the screen wondering who the "Robert Smith" who just added us might be - do we know them, and if so, how? And are they going to be upset if I ask them?

Apart from the "full name" thing they've done good work with the privacy settings. For each snippet of information you can choose whether it's entirely private, entirely public, available to only your contacts, available to only *some* of your contacts... that's good. There's also a "view profile as" function where you can check visibility by viewing your profile as (name of any contact, or public) and make sure that it's only as visible as you want it to be.

The two main selling points are Circles and Hangouts.

Circles is arranging your contacts into groupings (although a single contact can go into more than one Circle) so that you can control who sees what outgoing information. It also enables you to filter your incoming Stream - so for instance, if you don't want to see anything from your Work Circle at the weekend, you can just temporarily ignore the people in that circle.

Hangouts are small real-time group chatrooms with video, voice, and typed-chat capability. You click to "Hangout" and it creates the room. Your contacts may join you there (you can filter which ones) and anyone inside the Hangout can invite any of *their* contacts in, so it could be a good way of being introduced to new people. It seemed a bit patchy when I was using it at lunchtime - service dropped out a few times - but when it works I can see it being both fun and useful.

It is very much still in beta with a permanent "send feedback" tab at the bottom of the screen. The Google+ for mobile is apparently not yet available in the UK, which is annoying. Also, most of the conversations in my stream at the moment seem to centre around how the various features work, so it's hard to predict where it is going to go.

On the whole, I like it so far and I hope it will develop well.

Full story so far here >> http://www.kipfx.com/2011/07/google-plus-v-facebook-for-business-users/

This is awesome! Have applied to the business side, hopefully my spiel will get me in! Then I can really try this out, to stay away from duplicate content I will refrain from posting the whole article in here, but suffice to say I am impressed.

Check in = Google Places Listing (full listing)
Chat = Google Talk, allows live chat on websites whilst logged into a social network.
Legendary Google Extras = One click and I am in docs, calendar, adwords etc.

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I would add an extra bit about the photos on google plus, it actually has better quality and infos than facebook. I'm really annoyed when upload any photos on facebook.