While tech pundits are widely praising Google’s new Plus product, I’ve found the one feature that could take away from Facebook where it’s most dominant: Time on the site.
Facebook users are known for staying on the site for over half an hour a day, something no other site could compete with… until now.
To be honest, my gut reaction after using Google Plus was initially, “Why on earth would anybody switch to this from Facebook?”
However, when I loaded up Google Finance as I do every morning, I suddenly realized that I was asking the wrong question. The reality is that users won’t have the option of not using Google Plus.
Google already has more users than Facebook, over one billion. They aren’t going to suddenly leave Facebook in droves, they’re just going to spend more time on all the sites in Google’s network. That big notifications box in the top right of all Google sites is the reason why.
As I’m browsing around Google-powered sites there’s occasionally a red notification alert that pops up and immediately grabs my attention. Soon enough I’m clicking through the various notifications and seeing what my friends have shared and who has recently begun sharing with me.It seeks to make traditionally risky online sharing more personal, selective and most importantly—private.
In allowing its users to have control over content sharing, Google believes Google + offers its users a more nuanced online sharing that mimics real life. "Online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it," said Vic Gundotra, Google's Senior Vice President of Engineering of Google + in the company blog.
Erica Newland, a policy analyst at Center for Democracy and Technology who has had access to Google+ says, "It seems to be a really cool product with brand new services. It is very clear that Google is competing on privacy and that will be appealing to a lot of users."
As Facebook and other social networking sites are constantly battling privacy issues, Google + offers its users to selectively share what you want, to whom you want. Features such as Circles allow you to create distinct groups for different people in your contacts and through that, a user can invite respective group members to group video chat, send messages, share photos and search results of your common interests. In essence, it unifies the different platforms through which people communicate, consolidating many of Google's existing products such as Gmail, GChat and others into one place with the people you already know in your contacts.
Many analysts including Newland claim Circles is an innovative way to give users control over who they are sharing with, targeting their messages and the content they share. While Google+ is still an ongoing project, Newland predicts that this feature can make Google+ a viable option for parents concerned about their children being online.
"The amount of control built into Google+ will minimize mistaken sharing," says Newland. "That should give a lot of confidence to parents that their children will not be sharing any information to those not intended to receive it."
Li, as a parent of a 16 year old, agrees that Google+ is definitely a good and safe alternative. "As a parent of a then nine-year-old daughter who once mistakenly shared information publicly through Buzz, Google+ is very comforting. It's an issue of control. Being more private in your communication is highly important."
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