…And why Google+ is no Facebook killer

With its new social network, Google has scored a huge blow against its archenemy.
Yes, Google+ delivers features and functionality that Microsoft’s Bing search engine can’t touch.
Wrong archenemy, you say? Google+ is supposed to be a Facebook-killer? Ehhh, not so much.
At

least not now. While Google+ brings some welcome new features to the social-networking space, there’s no great innovation that would make you want to use it as your primary online identity, or that Facebook couldn’t emulate if it chose to.

Google+, which launched about a month ago, is officially a beta, or test, service; to join, you need an invitation from someone who’s already a user. Judging from the evidence, invites aren’t very hard to come by: Less than three weeks after launch, Chief Executive Officer Larry Page announced that the service had already signed  up 10 million members.

That sounds like a lot, and it is. But considering that Facebook is up around three-quarters of a billion, Google+ has a long way to go before your friends are as likely to be hanging out there as they are on the competition.

One unexpected result of using Google+ was that I found myself much more likely to use other parts of the Google ecosystem. Things like Gmail and the Picasa photo-sharing site, which have been around longer than Google+, felt less like disparate products and more like features of a unified, personal service.

Google describes its new network as a “project,” and I encountered a number of issues that made clear this is very much a work in progress. For example, I was unable to install the hangouts feature on a Mac using Apple’s Safari web browser; I finally got it working in Google’s Chrome browser.

Until the bugs are worked out and the service is opened to all comers, we have no way of knowing whether people really want or need another social network — and if so, whether this one’s features are compelling enough to attract them.

For Google, the best-case scenario is that the service proves so flexible and easy to use that it creates a network effect, where more and more people join because so many of their friends are already on it.

The worst case is that Google+ becomes to Facebook what Bing is to Google, less a real competitor than simply an alternative with some interesting features that aren’t sufficiently compelling to ever lift it above being a distant No. 2.

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Beware Facebook-Twitter users! You could be monitored

New Delhi: Here is a word of caution for Facebook and Twitter users. The private correspondence on the social networking sites could be tracked by the government now.
 
Referring to the use of social networking sites during recent terror attacks in the country, the Ministry of Home Affairs has asked the Telecom Ministry to keep a close watch on the increasing popularity of such sites.
 
Following the Home Ministry’s recommendations, the telecom ministry has decided to raise the vigil on all such social networking sites. However, it has made clear that keeping a track on the sites would not mean interfering into the personal accounts of the users.
 
According to the sources, there are plans to seek help of these sites to hold data about their users’ movement so as to thwart people from using this medium in carrying out illegal activities. And in doing so, only those accounts will be monitored which are found involved in any suspicious act.
 
“The telecom ministry has been asked to seek information of all such accounts on any networking site with the help of local police or intelligence agencies,” they said.
 
“There are some set parameters to raise the vigil on any given social network site. For instance, if there is a sudden surge in conversation ratio of a user on a social networking site and later it gets reduced drastically, that may raise doubts,” said an official. 
 
“Or if any user from India is found to be in regular and continuous contact with any social networking account abroad. The monitoring of a particular account can be undertaken if the individual starts using sign or code language or if he starts changing accounts on the networking site,” he added.

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