Will Google+ create ‘waves’?

Google launched its Facebook rival, Google+, on Wednesday. The search giant’s new launch has created a lot of stir in the technology world with its attempt to change “real-life sharing”.

As the company’s official blog declares: “Among the most basic of human needs is the need to connect with others. With a smile, a laugh, a whisper or a cheer, we connect with others every single day. Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools. In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.”

In another attempt to take on the social networking giant, Google’s new project offers features that increase real-life sharing among users. An interesting new feature to look out for is ‘Hangouts’, which allow face-to-face real-time chatting between many people. Another engaging feature is ‘Huddle’, which would allow group messaging between a group of people, or what Google calls, a ‘Circle’.

Commenting on the project, Rajiv Dingra, CEO and Founder, WATConsult, said, “On the features front Google has tried its best to be innovative. Even the names of the features are trendy like ‘Huddle’, ‘Sparks’, ‘Circles’ and ‘Hangouts’. All these features can be compared to existing ones on Facebook, for example, Circle is a friend categorising feature or ‘how do you know this person’ feature in Facebook, while Huddle is nothing but the friend chat already available on Facebook. The new or so-called different feature is the video chat called Hangout. Photo sharing again is common. I believe Facebook will be tracking this project closer than anyone else as it’s known to learn quickly from competition. It did so by adding real-time feed and @tagging from Twitter even before it took off in a big way on Twitter.”

But are these features enough to attract people from the already established Facebook? Chris George, CEO and Founder, EBS Worldwide, finds it an interesting new project. He said, “Google+ has innovative and interesting features to offer. Such as aligning friends within a 'Circle' to differentiate between different groups of people – family, friends and work.”

Not everyone is excited about it though. Dingra said, “This is another attempt by Google to garner a foothold in the social networking space. The problem is that this ship has already sailed with Facebook dominating it wholeheartedly.”

This is not the first of Google’s attempt to launch a social networking platform of its own. Besides Orkut, Google has launched similar unsuccessful projects which had promised to stir real-time networking.

Dingra said, “The best chance at least in the Indian context that Google had was Orkut, but their lack of innovation let that die a slow death. Google would do better on focusing the business apps side of business with Google apps, which is where it has little or no sizeable competition. The social networking space is unforgiving, and given Google’s track record, it’s highly unlikely users would log on. Some failures include Google Buzz and Google Wave. Hopefully Google+ does better than them.”

Google Wave, launched in May 2009, is similarly described by Google as “live, shared place on the web”. Google Buzz, launched in February 2010, was an add-on social sharing feature for Gmail. Both of them had failed to garner much user attention for Google.

George added, “The drawback for Google is that it has a history of introducing stuff that doesn’t pick up. One of the ways Facebook took over Orkut was actually social, peer pressure that it created among users. Suddenly it became important for people to be on Facebook, whether or not they were already using Orkut. If Google can build this network well, and attract more users, it can create similar pressure to make people leave Facebook and use Google+ instead.”