What is Google Plus?

At last, Google has made a serious comeback in it social networking yard and it can be a party spoiler for facebook. It is a much awaited reply from the search engine giant to facebook.  It’s the super top-secret social project that Google has been working on for the past year.  It seems to be Google has putted everything on the line to win this race and tell its competitor that the game is not finished yet. Apart from that, Google knows that it biggest competitor has a status of 700 Million plus following, Photo & Video Sharing, Chat, Groups & Fan Pages in the social market. So, what Google did is, it looked into what led to their failure with the previous experiments and what led to their competitor’s success and then built a product on the competitor’s weaknesses combined with its own strengths.

Google Plus really is a mixture of Facebook and Twitter. When you first get access to it, you’ll notice that the Circles feature allows you to categorize your connections to meaningful groups. I recommend everyone to set this up well as it will define your activity on Google Plus.You’re given default Circles however, you can create new ones. With Circles, you can push messages out only to the people who you intend it to go to and if you want to share it with everyone, just mark the update as ‘Public’. This way, you can stick to sharing stuff only with your friends the Facebook way or share public-ly the Twitter way. You can send messages out just text, images, links or even location. Choose whom you want the update to go to and boom. 

In short, It’s Google + Facebook + Twitter clone, with better groups, more private messaging and video chat, along with the promise of social gaming and much more to come, but it has only ‘sort-of’ arrived.

What is Google +1?

Google +1 is Google’s answer to the Facebook “like” button. If you find the search result useful or just enjoy the linked site, you hit the +1 icon. Google says by +1-ing a result you're giving it a recommendation, a stamp of approval. More +1's on a result means the site is more interesting.

Google+ has the capability to attract, it’s magnetic but it clearly not a Facebook destroyer. A lot of people seem to think that Google Plus is the new Facebook with additional features. Although, by first look, this social networking site is giving me a very impressive look, but replacing facebook is surely not a easy task to do. If team Google is really aiming to rebuild its empire in social networking market, then they have a need to add some more feature to their product for enhancing its capability. Indeed, nothing is wrong with facebook, if anyone wants to stick with facebook then he can because it is providing most of the features which google is promising to provide. And above them all, leaving your old account just because of some new features is not a easy task to do, until and unless you get a complete new platform to work upon. So at last, I don’t think facebook have any major threat with google plus, at least not in the near future.

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History of Facebook

Facebook was founded by former-Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg (while at Harvard) who ran it as one of his hobby projects with some financial help from Eduardo Saverin. Within months, Facebook and its core idea spread across the dorm rooms of Harvard where it was very well received. Soon enough, it was extended to Stanford and Yale where, like Harvard, it was widely endorsed.

Before he knew it, Mark Zuckerberg was joined by two other fellow Harvard-students – Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes – to help him grow the site to the next level. Only months later when it was officially a national student network phenomenon, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to pursue their dreams and run Facebook full time.

But Zuckerberg needed help to grow his little social networking site that could. He would not stop until The Facebook had been installed on all university campuses in America. In September 2004, they secured venture capital from PayPal founder Peter Thiel. The $500,000 investment was a start, but Zuckerberg and friends had big plans for The Facebook. Seeing the potential value in The Facebook, Jim Breyer and Accel Partners ponied up $12.7 million to assist Zuckerberg in the expansion of his virtual empire.

So by October 2004, Zuckerberg had the money, the manpower, and the institutional backing to go global. Betatesting continued on within the American University population for the next year, and in August 2005, The Facebook dropped the “The” and Facebook.com was registered for $200,000. The network opened up, and within months anyone with a valid institutional email address from over 30,000 organizations across the planet were eligible for membership, including high school students, government employees and the corporate community.