Facebook – soon to be MySpace II?
I won’t lie… I received an invite to Google+ from Computerworld and I’m feeling pretty special. What is Google+? It’s being hailed as the next social networking site—the Great Facebook Killer.
Facebook killer? Are you kidding?
Yeah, that’s what I thought. I mean Google Buzz was supposed the be the next great social thing and the buzzed turned into fizzle. And didn’t MySpace just throw in the towel in defeat to the undefeatable Facebook?
I feel a little bad about this because Facebook is building a new data center some five miles from my home and it’s a great source of pride to our community. But Google+ looks like the real deal. On the surface it looks like a Facebook remake. But there’s so much to it.
One thing I like about it is that, so far, there are no games on it. The main thing I hate about Facebook is all the game requests I get. They comprise of more than half my posts and, sorry, I don’t have any chickens to give away to someone’s FarmVille. I really like the way you can set up a “circle” of friends or family and place your “friends” in one or more of them. Facebook just added Skype to their fold for one-on-one video chatting. Google+, however, allows to create a “Hangout” where you can face-chat with up to ten people. They haven’t quite got this down pat yet, but knowing Google, they’ll plug at it until they get it right. I don’t have a webcam anyway, so I can’t take advantage of either offereing.
I haven’t really gotten into all the bells and whistles, but supposedly it could knock Twitter for a loop as well. You can blog as well as mini-blog in Google+. Apparently it has a lot more and, as I said, I haven’t used it a lot, but what I’ve seem I really, really like.
I don’t know if I’ll ever leave Facebook as most of my “friends” aren’t techies who’lll try anything once and once a non-techie starts using something and understands it, they get set in their ways and it’s hard to change.
But we’ll see. As someone said… “Has Facebook been MySpaced?”
