It’s been a week since Google has announced his brand-new social network Google Plus. What is really Google Plus? Check it out!

You, in Google Plus

Google Plus, the new Facebook?

It would be a shame to see this new network as an ersatz of Facebook. Google claims that it is really different and new. Of course, on the content, it looks like all social networks, with publications, videos, statuses, and links. The also looks like Facebook, with the “news feed” as a column in the middle, and the “+1” used as the Facebook “Like” button. Yet, there are quite a lot of differences between the two networks.

First, Google Plus is willing to bring all the best from the web on one platform. The goal is to keep the users on the Google site, where all the services are gathered, and not to have them once in a while, like on Facebook, because the only content is the social network. Google offers a range of new possibilities that has never been seen before.

Facebook have also been critiqued toward the confidentiality of contents, and Google promised a better protection.

What’s the Plus on Google Plus?

We all know that we don’t talk and share with all the people of our life the same way. On Facebook, all the contents are shared with all the supposed-to-be friends, but the point is that they are not all as friends as we think.

Because they are afraid to write something wrong, compromising, Facebook users are forced to censure themselves. We all have in ming the worker who posted pictures of his sunny holidays when he has supposed to be on sick-leave. It’s better to avoid those bad surprises.

Learning from Facebook’s mistakes, Google had the idea of these “circles”. But what is exactly all that about?

Let’s explain everything from the beginning.

When someone adds you, you can put this person in a circle (for exemple : colleagues, college friends, family, friends from the photography club).

Then, you have the possibility to partition the contents you are posting. Of course, you can share everything with everyone, but you can also share photos with your photo-friends, or party-pictures with your crazy college friends, but you can also share very serious stuff with you colleagues and even with your boss, and we won’t know anything about your wildlife! To your parents, you can only say that “everything-is-fine-thank-you-very-much”, and to your all family you can say “Happy Birthday”, but not all the (horrible) things you think about them after a whole week end with them. This seems to be a good solution to avoid bad surprises and embarrassing remarks.

Furthermore, Google Plus works just like Twitter with the system of “following” and “followers”. You can follow everyone you’d like to follow, but all these person will not necessarily follow you. This option seems quite enchanting for celebrities or brands. Let’s imagine a situation : You are walking in the street, you get geolocalised using Google Plus on your smartphone. You will then be a target for all the shops around you. They will be able to get personalized offers from them. Foursquare having been bought by Google was then a genius idea of them. In France, Bouygues Telecom and IKEA are already on the network to develop their visibility on proximity offers.

But the Plus is not only all that (even if it’s already quite a lot!). On Facebook, you can easily chat (when there are no bugs) with the people you like, but you won’t see their faces. Skype is quite good, but it’s not enough. You can only video-chat with one person in the free version of the software. What Google Plus wants to offer is a video-chat up to 10 persons, both for work meetings or for a party organization, for instance.

The “cloud” is also the trend for this year. IBM’s user can upload their datas in the “cloud”, Apple’s “Mobile me” will soon become « iCloud », and Google is also following this way. When you’ll take a picture with your mobile, it’ll be automatically put in the cloud. You’ll be able to have access to them from every computer and to share.

Why is everyone staring at Google?

Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, already declared that he “screwed up (on social networking)” because he didn’t succed in bringing the firm in the era of social networking. 

Between 2009 and 2010, both Google Wave (the revolutionary mail box) and Google Buzz (the kind of social network) failed miserably.

That’s also why Larry Page, the new CEO of Google, made social networking his priority number one, and will try to avoid the mistakes of the past few years.

Will it work?

Will all this new and revolutionary ideas be enough to concurrence the big-fat Facebook?

We can notice that the first thousands of users who had been invited on the beta-test version of Google Plus came so quickly that Google had to shut down the access for new users only after 48 hours. The happy few (including me) are now invited to test and discover all the part of it. Google didn’t mention when the real version will be available to the whole world.

Facebook, on its side, is not waiting. Four of the firm best engineers have already developped a new application that will allow users to organize their friends in circles… Seems familiar? This application, which is still not Facebook official, is called “Circle Hack” and seems to be directly inspired by Google Plus. The question is how will Google react to this direct threat?

But Mark Zuckerberg is also trying to investigate his concurrent’s social network. He is currently the most followed user of the beta-test version of Google Plus (even before Larry Page…), and it seems that it’s not an usurper : the profile picture is an unpublished one, and all his friends are from the Facebook team. This is really not surprising, considering how the launch of Google Plus is threatening the biggest social network with 700 million users (but, still, this number is now stagnant)… Is he trying to collect ideas where they are, or are they planning a hack, since they have George Hotz (Geohot) in their team now?

Let’s see what happened, and stay tuned!