Google+ : A healthy wealthy threat to facebook:

Soon you'll be searching for friends in google +. Keeping in mind the demand and power of social networking sites google the largest search engine of the world is ready to enter into this market with its new virsion of social networking website Google plus. Currently the site is on trial version with limited number of accounts only but soon it will be full fledged standing head to head with facebook. It will be available in over 40 different languages.


What is google +?

It is a social networking service operated by Google Inc. The service launched on June 28, 2011, in an invite-only testing phase. The following day, existing users were allowed to invite friends, who are above 18 years of age, to the service to create their own accounts. However, this was quickly suspended in a day after there was "insane demand" for accounts. Google+ will be built as a layer that not only integrates different Google social services, such as Google Profiles and Google Buzz, but also introduces many new features including Circles, Hangouts, Sparks and Huddles. Google+ will also be available as a desktop application and as an application on Android and iOS operating systems. Sources such as The New York Times have declared it Google's biggest attempt to rival the social network Facebook, which had over three quarters of a billion users in 2011.


Key features of google + :

• "Circles" enables users to organize contacts into groups for sharing, across various Google products and services. Although other users can view a list of people in a user's collection of circles, they cannot view the names of those circles. The privacy settings also allows users to hide the users in their circles as well as who has them in their circle. Organization is done through a drag-and-drop interface. This system replaces the typical friends list function used by sites such as Facebook.
• "Huddle" is a feature available to Android, iPhone, and SMS devices for communicating through instant messaging within circles.
• "Hangouts" are places used to facilitate group video chat (with a maximum of 10 people participating in a single Hangout at any point of time). However, anyone on the web could potentially join the 'Hangout' if they happen to possess the unique URL of the Hangout.
• "Instant Upload" is specific to Android mobile devices; it stores photos or video in a private album for sharing later.
• "Sparks" is a front-end to Google Search, enabling user to identify topics they might be interested in sharing with others; "featured interests" sparks are also available, based on topics others globally are finding interesting.
• Through "Streams," users see updates from those in their circles, updates similar to Facebook's news feed. The input box allows users to enter a status update or use icons to upload and share photo and videos.

Google+ reportedly had a remarkably higher ratio of men than women at launch, because it was initiated by invitation from a population of the primarily young male software engineers at Google.

How google + better than facebook:

1) Google+ Circles: Better Privacy Control

Rather than having a Facebook’s Friends’ list, Google+ groups your friends via +Circles. And the best thing about these +Circles are that it allows you to share your status update or photo or anything with your choice of +Circle. This is something that gives Google+ a bit edge over Facebook in privacy control.

2) Google+ Hangouts: Allows Video Chat For Up To 10 People

Considering the fact that Facebook even now doesn’t have the video chat feature, tech buffs are already pointing out where Google+ already is ahead in the social networking game. Using +Hangouts in Google+, 10 people at a time could video chat using +Hangouts.

3) +Sparks: Choose Who to Share News/Topics With

This  by far is our favorite feature, and the simple reason for that being the fact that the +Sparks gives articles and videos that it thinks you might be interested in reading and hence gives you something to read, watch and share whenever you are free. A Google+ user might want to share a news or video with specific Circles in their Social Network, and the good thing here is that if you want you can either share the news or topic with a certain Circle on your social network or can share it with all of your connections on Google+.

4) Google + Safer Content Sharing.a Privacy advocate has social networking sites for long. The user can assign a degree of confidentiality of each share content, instead of using a configuration of the predefined list of privacy. All actions can be called to decide

So lets see who wins google or facebook.

Thanks