Google’s new Social Networking Site – Google+ project

With Facebook’s growing domination in the social networking space, Google’s Orkut lost the race long back. The orkut team came up with new UI’s and quite a few upgrades but couldn’t get back their charm. For the past one year there has been NEWS(read as rumors) that Google has been working on creating an entirely new platform to combat Facebook’s popularity.

Some time back, google had launched +1 share button. And as we have seen during the wave days, when Google came out with BUZZ that tools, are interlinked.

The +1 share button will be playing a key role in the Google Plus platform, equivalent to you can say the Facebook ‘Like’ button.

What is Google + (Plus) Project?

It is the Google’s new Social Network platform, a direct answer to Facebook. The platform has not been launched yet and is under going field testing. Field testing involves a small group of people across the world using and testing the application to make sure its bug free before launch.

New Features in Google Plus

• Circles : This features involves arranging your friends/contacts in various circles of friends, family or anything you want. These circles or in simple words groups will enable easy sharing to limited people. Watched a movie last night? Share the review with your friends. Found technical/work-related videos, share it instantly with all your colleagues. This feature will diminish your requirement of choosing/tagging people when sharing something. The circles are flexible, interactive and quite a fun feature.

• Hangouts : Hangouts are like what its name suggests. You can create a hangout space and invite people to join. Everyone can video/voice chat as if in a conference. This feature will help bring people together in place virtually and socialize LIVE. Though there are sites which are already providing a similar feature, I believe this will be a first for a social network. This feature also shows, google’s capability to make-use of existing technologies. For this feature, google has integrated its talk gadget video conferencing feature which enable users to video chat earlier on Gtalk. So, yes to use this feature one needs to install the plugin.

• Sparks : A simple way of staying up-to-date in your interest areas. Sparks are simply feeds on various topics of interest. One can choose and add interest topics. The interest topics will pull posts, pictures, videos from the interest area. Sounds similar to Google Reader Play.