Google goes social with Facebook rival
Google, the king of Internet search but a bust on the social front,
launched its rival to Facebook on Tuesday, a social networking service
called Google+.
“Online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it,”
Google’s senior vice president for engineering Vic Gundotra said in a
blog post about the long-awaited social networking initiative from the
Internet giant.
Unveiling Google+, Gundotra stressed the ability it gives users to
separate online friends and family into different “Circles,” or
networks, and to share information only with members of a particular
circle. “We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing
to software,” he said. “We want to make Google better by including you,
your relationships and your interests.”
One of the criticisms of Facebook is that updates are shared with all
of one’s friends unless a user has gone through a relatively complicated
process to create separate Facebook Groups. “Not all relationships are
created equal,” Gundotra said. “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,” he said. AFP
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