Vs 
There are lots of talks around the corner in the “World of social networking” these days. Every business user trying to link their business to the social networking sites to gain more attention in the age of social media. Not to say that it helps to keep in touch with your friends whom you have not met for even more than a decade. They really make even an introvert human into a social animal.
Today Google announced that its Google+ platform is now open to the users across the globe. Also it has announced a whole bunch of updates to its Google + Platform – starting from minor corrections to some really cool stuffs. There were not much talks or rumors about this announcement. Has Google rushed to make announcements just before Facebook’s big day – “Facebook F8” Developer conference, this Thursday? Well, May be!
The new features which interests me the most are “Mobile Hangouts”, “Hangouts on Air” and “Screen Sharing”.
Mobile Hangouts: Hangouts using your phone (App for Android released today. IOS App expected to be released soon)
Hangouts on Air: Hangouts session through broadcast. As of now, 9 broadcast sessions are allowed, but moving forward, the number of sessions would be increased.
Screen Sharing: This is yet another cool stuff … With integration to Google Voice, Talk and Docs, this will further strengthen their unified communication space.
But do we still have the question as to is who is going to emerge as a Winner in this space? Well may be not…
With the tight integration of Google+ to all of its products including its android platform, Google is trying hard to grab its piece of share. Not to mention Google homepage now has a Big BLUE arrow pointing to its Google+ platform from its Google homepage 🙂 to make sure that users go and login to Google+ atleast once.
My thought (as most of you would agree) is that “Facebook” is still going to lead the space just because it has entered the market quicker and grabbed a major chunk of market share (did we ever talk about social networking when Orkut was there?) and its a big pain to be in more than one social networking site. The number of people signed in for Google+ really does not mean that Google+ is a success one. The initial hype and the craze for Google made everyone to sign-in to Google+ and post messages for few days, but they switched back to Facebook quickly.
Although Google is not going to miserably fail as it has happened for Google Wave, its still going to lag behind Facebook. The only magic which can turn around the ranking in scoring card for Google is it’s integration to mobile platform . In any case, the way it has built those smart applications within Google+ will help them fight against some of the tough competitors in those space. Example: Hangouts clubbed with Google talk will strengthen their competition against Skype and others in that space.
Hey ! Did I mention about Twitter? Well, that’s silent for now, so most probably last in the ranking.
Facebook redesigned its homepage today with newsfeed on the top of the page and updates on the right side… On a first look, the facebook page looks so congested now after the new update released today.The image viewer seems to be copied form Google+ 🙂
With due appreciation to the Google+ team, let’ wait for Facebook F8 conference to see what they announce.
TechBizTrends 
Twitter s not last… 🙂 Infact, their target audience are totally different. So it would not be fair to comare with g+ or Fb..!
And hangout now seems to have remained the only key distinguishing feature of G+ after FB’s smart lists. FB’s latest features have surely gained a lot of traction but this could be temporary too.
As you said, integration would be what G+ would try to sell but we would just have to wait and watch who wins this very interesting battle 🙂
Agreed… but there are no talks on anything new coming up in twitter apart from few of the top honchos saying “Bye bye” 🙂