July 10th, 2011 New Social Network – Google+ powered by Google

A week ago, Google made another attempt to break into the market of social networking. Strange but true – having almost a billion of users, Google can not join them in their own social services, thereby finally entering the lives of people in almost all areas of the Web.

Previous attempts to lead the company into the social sector can not be called successful. The very first social networking site from Google was Orkut. Unfortunately, it has spread mainly in India and Brazil, but it was not appreciated by Europe and the U.S. Then there were stillborns, as they were later called, Buzz and Wave, as well as several smaller ones, like Jaiku and Dodgeball.

And now a new attempt – Google +. We can see at first glance that this product will surpass its predecessors. Interface has the new design, high speed, the original idea with the circles of contacts and accurate integration of all Google services.

The main functionality is very similar to Buzz – the same live news feed that tries to visualize any inserted media content with a branch of comments. Such news feed is a mandatory attribute of almost all social networks – it can be seen on Facebook and many others. Google + stream looks more simple and pure, while at the same time offering a convenient navigation system between the posts. The same service can be seen in Google Reader. Hotkeys were taken from Google Reader: j – jump to the next post, k – return to the previous one.

Community contacts (circles) can be called a main feature of the new network. They can be useful to sort the entire list of contacts by areas of communication and interest. The meaning of their work is that now you can sort your list of contacts by the circles of communication, and subsequently set up for these communities different levels of access to personal information.

Many people complained that having a large number of contacts, Facebook provides too much unnecessary information, and Twitter – too little. Google + can be configured in such a way that the information received as much as you wish.

Another powerful tool – a video conference. With their help, Google can lure of Facebook-users. It is free, has a minimal number of settings and supports simultaneous video calls up to 10 people. At the same time this function is still quite raw, video is not in the best quality, there is out of sync video and audio, which is directly proportional to the time of the conference, the problem with sound card drivers, as well as the lack of cross-browser compatibility. In Skype video quality is better.

An interesting feature is the ability to insert youtube stream in real time during a video conference. The voices volume is lowered. At the same time holding the microphone icon, you can regain a sound and, for example, to comment the video.

The project is still in progress, so we hoped that the final version of all the defects will be corrected.