Google announces Google plus, takes aim at Facebook

Google announced its new social network called Google Plus, taking aim at his most important rival,Facebook. 

The big announcement was made on Google's Official Blog in its article entitled: Introducing the Google+ project: Real-life sharing, rethought for the web. 

Trying to break the social market for years, Google Google has been unsucessfull in his previous attempts,namely Google Wave and Buzz. Many have been speculating when Google would launch his own Facebook-style social network site, especially after Google rolling out its +1 button and subsequently rumors such as Google Me! 

Google Plus, or Google + bears an outstanding similarity to Facebook, including wall-like feeds and friends. Google Plus includes innovates by including specialized groups of friends called Circles. Circles lets you group you contacts e.g. friends, family, acquaintance. This feature will let you share specific information with each group of contacts. 

Google Plus online sharing engine is called Sparks and pretty much acts like an RSS reader as Facebook news feed. Sparks are aimed at delivering a feed of highly contagious content from across the Internet. 

There is also an innovative feature called Hangouts that enables live group video chats, aiming to promote impulsive meetings with up to 10 people. 

Google Plus includes a strong Mobile component featuring aspects such as Location and Instant Uploads where the users can post pictures and videos to an album. Strong integration with the Android platform should be expected. 

Last but no the least, Google Plus introduces Huddles, which is a group texting feature similar to Beluga (now acquired by Facebook) that lets you have group chats via your phone.

When Clouds Roll In Will You Be Covered?

Read any netbook , smartphone, tablet, or laptop reviews and at the forefront of the conversation is whether or not a reliable connection can be made in enough places for Twitter and other social networking sites to be accessed. Nobody really cares about whether or not the computer comes equipped with a word processor or video editor, as much as reviewers try and make these important issues to dictate to the consumer.

With the introduction of iCloud from Apple and the Chromebook from Google there’s growing concern spreading across the web over the future of cloud  servers, which have been an ideal network model for years but never properly put into action. If more and more people are losing interest in the specifics of software in favor of guaranteed online access to open source software we might at last be seeing the start of a major shift in server and networking sciences.

Think about how the companies just mentioned are reacting to the increasing interest in cloud computing and cloud storage relative to what they stand to gain from such technology. Apple has decided to market their cloud technology as a means to connect the sophisticated devices clouding is supposed to eradicate, because they have a big interest in keeping people buying thousand dollar computers. Google, on the other hand, is the biggest leader of cloud computing to-date, with the ambitions to back it up. They don’t have much to lose from popularizing low-cost laptops meant for a cloud network, but they have a lot to gain from such a revolution. Meanwhile Microsoft sits back and observes the underling competitors fight amongst themselves, ready to do whatever ends up becoming the trend.

Returning to social networks, people are already more than happy to accept the idea of being part of off-site networks and contributing piles of private information to remote software space. There was once the fear that handing valuable data and hard work over to a remote server or network was increasing the risk of security breach. There was assurance in keeping all of your important files on a single terminal. But these days we’re seeing more and more reason to at the very least back up data remotely. Before long people won’t have a problem having everything they do occur via a cloud network.

Then the colossal computer hardware and software manufacturers invested in things staying the way they are might get a little stressed. In the interim they’ll just try and convince us cloud computing is a bad idea and that we still need a terabyte-worth of memory and enough juice to run a dozen programs at once. When the day comes when Twitter, Facebook, word processors, spreadsheets, news, weather, games, and gadgets can all run concurrently on a cheap notebook running everything from online, good luck trying to persuade the public that’s not a good deal.