Google+ First Impression: Is A Twitter/Facebook Hybrid
Google+ is not like other social services launch like Google Wave,Buzz it’s a determined effort grab its space in Social arena or to fulfill Google’s wish of having a open social network. Google has brought to rival the facebook dominance in social web. I am not commenting anything about Facebook’s role or exit over here as many of my friends already started arguing with me about Facebook’s importance, but what I want to say is Google+ is here to stay for some time.
Lets see what makes Google+ better, a single line to explain Google+ is “Google+ is Twitter/Facebook Hybrid”.
Google had been really cautious as it had to face to privacy charges when it launched Google Buzz. But now the privacy setting seems to be awesome, you can create circles and share things you want within the circles. Google also allows us to create custom circles apart from 4 circles (Friends, Family, Acquaintances, Incoming). Hangout is a feature that none of the Social Networks have ever introduced, video conference up to 10 people at the same time. Google as always has designed Google+ aesthetically, with lot of whitespace and large icons, it hardly takes any time for anyone to get used to it.Google Stream is just like the Facebook feed, it has been classified in circles, when you click the respective circles you can see the updates over there. You can add images,videos, links, location along with the status update.
Sparks is designed something similar to Facebook pages, the pages are categorized as interests as you add your interests the updates on these start appearing in your stream.Buzz had hardly any changes its been integrated out here without any changes.Google+ shares the photos from Picasa, Google+ provides unlimited storage for photos, which are automatically re-sized to 2048 pixels. Videos up to 15 minutes in length are also free. I don’t know how the current usage of my Picasa Web albums came down to zero has got to do anything with Google+. Might that be because all my photos where re-sized below 2048. Anyways this is cool, just like having unlimited image upload. All the images in Picasa once brought to Google+ can be tagged by your friends and family based on the privacy settings. Google has crafted its photo viewer really well along with tagging, photo details and commenting on the right side. The same old sleek and beautiful chat in Gmail and Orkut is brought to Google+.Google+ is also available on mobile right from the first day and has native apps for Android and other phones can access the web app.
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