If you haven't already heard, Google Plus is now open to public. Still in beta though. So if you have been waiting and waiting for the opportunity to try it out or if you are finally sick of Facebook and want to migrate, the chance is finally here. Am I excited? Well, lets see if enough of my friends move over and abandon Facebook. Facebook has got the stranglehold for more than 5 years and its subscriber base definitely won't die off the way Friendster, Hi5 and Multiply died. Odds are, people will still keep going to Facebook as they have invested too much in it in terms of time, building their friends list, photo uploads, etc.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who has many times on Facebook found lost contacts or acquaintances. The thought of having to find them all over again on Google Plus is daunting. They might not join Plus and you may never find them again. This is one of the reason why people would not change immediately, but rather would use both at once. But then again, having to use 2 social networks is a pretty darn time waster. Even with just Facebook people are spending so much time already, so imagine having to maintain both. Throw Twitter in and you have a day job! But I know you people will do that.... :)
Facebook is now trying to keep ahead of the pack and has released several updates in the past few weeks. They have put more priority on privacy and security and much like Plus' Circles, now lets you easily share certain stuff with certain group of people with their implementation of "lists". Its never too late if the crowd is still there for you. And recently they have also tried streamlining the news and status updates that you see on your front page, but it has bagged much mixed reactions (mostly angry!) from the users. But they are used to that. The people at Facebook pretty much pushed out a few changes in the past year alone and always got hate mails. But they know the users will keep going back and get use to it. This could change though when Plus is at its full speed.
As I asked myself before in the beginning of this post, am I excited with Google Plus? Well, not unless everyone moves there, but the task of having to re-add my friends and probably to re-post all my previous pics that I want to share again.... pluhhh! Pretty daunting. I wish there was someway that we can merge the contacts of Facebook and Plus together or better still, Google buys out Facebook and the users are at peace again! :) But unless Plus can outplay Facebook this time, I don't think we will see Google buying out Facebook. When I say this time, I say it because this is not the first time Google is trying their hand at a social network to beat Facebook. Remember Google Wave (died), and Buzz (still trying hard to survive)? But Plus has been a carefully thought out plan and looks more like a threat to Facebook then the previous two attempts were.
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