'Google +' Social Networking Service Launched

Daijiworld Media Network
With input from agencies

USA, Jun 29: The world's best and most widely-used internet search engine Google has lauched its new, long-awaited social networking service, which will directly challenge the supremacy of Facebook. The new features and user-friendly tools might take Google+ to a new dimension in the social networking arena.

Google+ will allow users to post photos, videos, messages, comments, and its specialities will be 'real world intercations' and 'real life sharing' online, according to Google media release.

Features like Circles, Sparks, Hangouts and Mobile will be a big hit with the young generation, say Google officials.

web URL: https://plus.google

The recent report had disclosed that, the number of people using Facebook has dropped in the UK for the second month in a row, mirroring similar falls in the US, Canada and Norway - giving the first signs that the social network's popularity may be waning in the west.

But the website continues to grow worldwide, hitting an all-time high of 687 million users. That is according to data from the tracking company Inside Facebook, which uses Facebook's own advertising tools to determine the number of people using the site every month.
 
Growth has slowed, however, having risen by 13.9 million accounts in April and then just 11.8 million in May. Typically in the past year it has grown by 20 million a month. That slowdown could thwart founder Mark Zuckerberg's ambition to reach one billion users worldwide, despite his prediction last June that: "It is almost a guarantee that it will happen."
 
Google's Senior Vice President for Engineering, Vic Gundotra said in a blog post, "Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. Through the Google Plus project, we'd like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software".

Circles, for example, shares the user's information with a large number of his \ her friends and colleagues (rather than only close friends), thus expanding the friends circle of the user. That does not mean that all your info will be up for grabs. Google clarifies that the service will let users share just the right things with just the right people. The feature allows the user to club certain groups of users, such as My school pals, My colleagues, etc. Information shared in such groups will be exclusive to the group members.

Hangouts lets you convey to your friends when you will be free for a video hangout: to watch online videos together, just like going to a movie together. Sparks is a feed of things you're interested in. You can specify your fields of interest, so that when you're free, there will always be something waiting to be watched, read, or shared. Users will also have access to an Instant Upload feature using which, Google will instantly add photos taken by a user to a private album in the cloud, with the permission of the user, of course. One major difference between Google's new service and Facebook, is that the former will let users video chat with several friends simultaneously.

Currently, this service is in the pilot stage and is available by invitation only.