Google has launched a new online sharing tool ‘Google+’ , as the search giant once again attempts to gain ground on Facebook in the social media arena.
The service gives users the ability to separate online friends and family into different “Circles,” or networks, and to share information only with members of a particular circle.
The service aims to address one of the key criticisms of Facebook, where updates are shared with all of one’s friends unless a user has gone through a relatively complicated process to create separate Facebook Groups.
Several new tools are integrated into Google+, including “Hangouts,” which allows for video chatting among friends, “Mobile” for location-sharing and “Huddle” for group text messaging.
Photos and video can be uploaded and shared among Circles using a feature known as “Instant Upload,” while an online sharing engine called “Sparks” delivers content from the Web into a user’s feed.
In an officail Google blog post, Vic Gundotra Google’s senior vice president for engineering, said: “Online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it. We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships and your interests.”
“Not all relationships are created equal. So in life we share one thing with college buddies, another with parents, and almost nothing with our boss. The problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food — wrapping everyone in ‘friend’ paper — and sharing really suffers,”
Google’s previous attempt at social networking, Google Buzz, launched in February 2010, ran in to trouble for automatically converting users ‘private’ Gmail contacts into ‘public’ social media friends.
It sparked a slew of privacy complaints and led to a slap on the wrist from the US Federal Trade Commission.
Under a settlement between the US regulator and Google announced in March, Google is required to implement a comprehensive privacy program and will be subject to independent privacy audits every two years for the next 20 years.
Located at plus.google.com, Google + is currently being tested by a small number of people or is available by invitation only.
But Google said in a message on the site that it “won’t be long before the Google+ project is ready for everyone.”
Google dominates Internet search but has failed to make inroads on the social networking front, where Facebook has accumulated nearly 700 million users and Twitter around 200 million.
cfommenting on the potential of Google+, Mark Edmonson, head of natural search at agency Guava, said: “With the social graph context combining with the data Google already knows about your email contacts and search history, this could within 5 years evolve into search without searching – Google pushing info to you on what it thinks you will like. SEO of the future will be about how to get in this Spark feed to the most targeted people rather than today’s SEO based on web search queries.”
Click below to view an official Google video explaining how Google+ works:
