Google+ a Facebook Threat?

Stop me if you’re heard this before:  Google just developed another application. 

Never an organization to take failures too much to heart, Google is diving into the world of social networking again with the new Google+ application.  Launched exactly one week ago on Tuesday, June 28 to a select group of invitees, Google+ has been widely seen as a threat to Facebook.  Not that I would know from personal experience, since much like the failed Wave project, Google has limited its access to a select number of invitees, and early demand was such that “insane demand” caused them to stop their issuance altogether.

Even with a limited number of invites, it has not taken long for the always-on-top-of-things Search Engine Watch site to run not only an article on privacy issues, but a second article that was concerned about Google+‘s requirement that users define their circles of friends.  Let’s hope that sounds easier than it is, since it’s primarily the Wave interface that caused that project to fail.

Actually, from an educational perspective, the idea of “circles” of friends has some interest.  Most of us don’t—and shouldn’t—invite current students to be “friends” on Facebook, unless you’ve developed a course site to be a “fan” of.  With Google+, it SOUNDS like one can post things that only apply to a specific circle.

Detailed information—from the Google perspective—is available via several videos posted on their blog site. If you scroll to the end of that entry, you will find LOTS of links to other sites that talk about the project.  (Selected by Google, of course.)

If you’re interested in seeing what the welcome screen, at least, looks like, it’s available here:  http://plus.google.com. At the time of this writing, however, don’t bother with signing in with your  Gmail account; you will get a screen saying that it has “temporarily exceeded our capacity.”  

As with everything Google-related, this bears watching.

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