Like most college students, I love social networking. Facebook keeps me in touch with everyone I've ever been lucky enough to meet and Twitter provides me with constant updates about the news, local events, celebrity happenings and cultural information. YouTube allows me to share videos with friends, and through Skype I can see my family every week even though I'm not home. So, naturally, when I heard about a new social media outlet, I had to be a part of it.
Internet superstar and multinational public company Google has released the beta version of its new and rapidly growing networking site, Google+. Invitations to join the project were released to a select few who had Gmail accounts.
I was not one of the lucky few who were initially invited, and though I felt a decreased sense of importance, I shamelessly begged a friend for an invitation via my Gmail account.
Creating my page felt awkward I copied and pasted information and pictures from my Facebook. Once I established a moderately decent profile, I began to look for people to add to my Circles.
The concept of Circles is what really sets Google+ apart. When you add people you know, you can organize them into different categories "Friends from Dartmouth," "Friends from Home," et cetera. Users can select what types of information are visible to each Circle. Google+ even has a few preset Circles, in which it separates "Acquaintances" from categories like "Friends" and "Family."
Although Facebook has a similar Lists option it is more difficult to categorize your hundreds or thousands, depending on one's level of social activity of friends in retrospect. Google+ included this feature in the original release in late June.
The network has been around for about a month, and Google+ has more than 10 million sign-ups. An even more impressive statistic is the growth rate from yesterday to today, a rise of 30 percent in the number of users. Whether it is a result of the selective invitation process or the media attention it has gotten from sources such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, Google+ is definitely the next big thing to hit the World Wide Web.
Looking at other social network success and failures, it's difficult to determine whether or not Google+ will triumph. Although it shares similarities like photo sharing and "status updates" with the ever-popular Facebook and Twitter, Google+ has yet to join them in including celebrity and company profiles.
On the other end of the spectrum, some once-booming sites such as MySpace and Friendster have been left vacant, lacking online presence. How will Google+ avoid this failure? To analyze what exactly caused the demise of these domains, I prefer to speak from personal experience: I left MySpace because Facebook had more to offer.
The transition from Facebook to Google+ will be a harder one, because users have invested so much time and put so much information on Facebook. How does one go about accumulating all those friends again? What do I do about moving the photo albums that I have created on Facebook? Will people log into Google+ more frequently than any other social media outlet?
Let's not forget how valuable the information we post on the internet is. Facebook acts like a safe haven, because users can adjust settings so their information won't be indexed and posted for everyone to access. Companies like Google are known for their massive storage of information and their capability to make it available to whoever types a keyword into a search bar. But despite the contrary purpose of its parent, Google+'s privacy features are rather extensive.
In time, Google+ will be more popular than Facebook. It has more advanced technology, with features such as group video chat, that Facebook has yet to incorporate into its system, though it has recently joined with Skype to allow one-on-one video chatting.
Though Facebook's features remind me that the world is a small place, full of lively and remarkably personable individuals to meet, I love the confidence Google+ provides by allowing users to easily select who can see certain information. Google+ is geared as a supplement to real relationships, whereas Facebook is almost a platform for strangers to be considered friends.
