Google+

Google +1
Have you watched “The Social Network”, its the story of the conception of Facebook, currently the worlds largest social network with over 600 million users worldwide. In the movie Mark Zuckerberg proclaims the Facebook as cool, well over the years Facebook has been losing its cool, what with the ever increasing advertising on the site, third party applications that have questionable access to your information and the endless Farmville requests. If anyone deems tending to an imaginary farm as productive use of their time, well.... you get the picture.

Alas there is a new kid in town with the potential give Facebook a few sleepless nights, Google+. My first impressions of Google's new social network are very positive. The interface is very clean and well thought out and its innovative sharing system is one of a kind, let me run you through some of the main features. Circles

Google's sharing system is called “circles” and it allows you to assign your peeps into various circles. So you could put your family in one, your friends, your co workers, your girlfriends etc, you can then choose to share your posts with the various circles or individual people within them, so something you may find a little to much for you family you can just share with your friends and vice versa. You can also add people to your circles, regardless whether you know them personally or whether they add you to theirs, in a similar fashion to following people on Twitter. 

SparksI was also impressed with “sparks” which is similar to liking a page on Facebook of something your interested in, I found sparks allows you to be very specific on your interests.... so for example on Facebook I might like the page LFC (Liverpool Football Club) and I will receive any updates to that page in my news feed, on Google+ however I could spark an individual player from that football team and I would receive news and information within my stream updated in real time from the Internet.  HangoutThe hangout function I have not tried yet due to my lack of a webcam, it allows group video chat with people in your circles, although with Facebook's new cooperation with Skype we could see something similar appearing on Facebook in the future. HuddleHuddle is a feature only available on the Google+ mobile apps and allows group text chat, which I am hoping finds its way onto the desktop version in the future as it seems a cool idea for when your organising things with groups of people.
Mobile Apps are available for both Android and Apple, although the Google+ app on iOS 5 is rumoured to have a few issue'sWhat we need to bear in mind is that Google+ is only a few weeks old and is still in the testing phase, its not going to be released to the general public until the beginning of August. It has many positives in its arsenal at the moment and I expect Google to push the product heavily with its vast online presence. So teething problems with the Apps and other little issues will hopefully be ironed out in the coming months, also upcoming new features such as games and integration with other products means its exciting times at Google HQ