My initial reaction to the announcement of the Google+ project was that they were really going to find it impossible to compete with Facebook. We should never rule out Google and more I read about the project on the official blog of Google, the more I think that they have some very good points which are going to help them considerably. They take quite a few digs at Facebook, as well as BlackBerry’s BBM instant message service, without naming them, saying for example, with reference to BlackBerry’s BBM, “They are annoying, for starters. You can ping everyone that is ‘available’, but you are bound to interrupt someone’s plans. They are also really awkward. When someone does not respond, you don’t know if they are just not there, or just not interested.”

Google+ has created hangouts to compete with that and you have casual meetings alive multi-person videos. If you set your phone to allow it, any picture that you take will automatically be added to Private Cloud album. The part that I enjoyed the most was their dig at Facebook, and basically they say that not all relationships are created equally, “… so in life we share one thing with college buddies, another with parents and almost nothing with our boss. The problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food – wrapping everyone in ‘friend’ paper – and sharing really suffers.” To combat this, Google has created circles where you can put people into the circles that they belong – so most of my staff would put me under workers, and the people they don’t want to share anything with, and you can create circles for your friends and family – so you can automatically put people into different groups and essentially allow them to see different things.

This is obviously a direct go at Facebook, without naming them, and Google says of the Facebook approach, where everyone is your friend, “It’s sloppy … it’s scary … it’s insensitive.” They say every online conversation is public performance, because you got well over 100 “friends” reading it, and we are forced to hear, online, from people all the time including those that we only have time for once a week, if that.