Last June 2011, Google has announced their newest product called Google+. This is a social networking site that is meant to bring together all of your friends in one place. It allows you to easily designate and organize all of your contacts into different groups. Having different groups such as Picasa, Gmail and Google Maps, I would understand that Google+ will have both its strengths as well as limitations. Google+ was supposedly developed to rival one of the most popular social networking sites – Facebook.

Facebook has been launched as a social networking site in February 2004, which was founded by Mark Zuckerberg. It is amazing how much it all started with a few users, just a few people from a dormitory. Then it was shared to other colleges in Boston, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. With added support from those colleges, Facebook was then offered to other colleges and universities and then eventually to high school students and anyone aged 13 and above. So, as of February 2012, Facebook has more than 845 million active registered users. Some companies are even offering services that can help Facebook members increase their Fanpage activity that will increase their popularity in Facebook. Marketingheaven.net, a marketing company, is offering this type of service that can help Facebook members boost their numbers by helping them buy targeted facebook fans. Because of the popularity of Facebook, it has been used not only for personal reasons but for promoting business as well which is evident by the thousands of business pages registered in the site.

Because of the current status of Facebook’s number of users, people can’t help but compare it with Google+. What will be its strengths and limitations as a social networking site?

Strengths
• Google+ is new. Nowadays, people tend to get curious and would always want to try something new. Since it is just a new product, it has been build around the flaws and limitations of its competitors that is why they are saying that Google+ has addressed many of the security issues of Facebook.
• Easy to handle, simple and easy to use. Because of advance technology, people wanted things to be simpler now and easier. Google+ has these characteristics as their strength.
• No useless advertising and spam.
• User Interface is the best so far.
• Introduced the circles wherein you can add people in “circles” or groups. They claim that Google+ Circles is far better than Facebook’s or Twitter’s list. With Circles, members can set the restrictions per circle giving them full control on what information will be shared for each group.

Limitations
• To those who weren’t adventurous enough to try something new, trying Google+ would not be probably an option
• Google+ surprisingly doesn’t have a search tool. Google is the most powerful search engine out there, why not use it in Google+?
• Google+ doesn’t work with Google Apps. People have started to appreciate Google apps as soon as they got hold of smart phones. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work with Google+.
• There were a few limitations when it comes to the User Interface like the old posts keep on showing up on top of the window rather than in a chronological order

With the Facebook being the number 1 social networking site to date, I think Google+ will have a hard time competing. But looking at the strengths of their product, I would think that just a few revisions, a few updates and a couple of marketing strategies, they would probably pull it off. Who knows after a few years, Google + might be able to give Facebook a dose of its own medicine and might kill Facebook just like what Facebook did with Friendster.

Author’s Bio: Abie is a freelance blogger and content writer for more than 5 years now. She writes on different topic including Parenting, Family, Health & Fitness, Technology, Travel and more.