Google+ Circles brace for another social venture

Being a copycat in China, it’s for sure you can make a lot of money. Baidu (百度) , Tencent, Dangdang are good examples. Now our western counterpart Google, unleashing its Google+ beta test on June 28th, decides to go for “copy and paste” from social media giant Facebook.

During the last 8 trading days, Google’ s market price roses US48 per share, from US493 on June 28th to US531 July 8th. The new social networking tool thus gives a 10 per cent plus to its share price. Not too bad!! Will the share price prevails? One however should not forget the lesson learnt from Google Wave and Google Buzz!

Google share prices picks up almost 10 percent after Google+ beta announcement

Google+ in many ways, is similar to Facebook. So far I find an exception of “Circles”. A function for inviting, importing friends from users’ address books and sorting them into different baskets for sharing news and events. The user interface in this part is easy to understand and use – simply drag and drop.

Google Plus Friend Circles

However, we can’t see any break-through in concept or user interface design – it is the most challenging part. Perhaps Google has a few secret weapons at stake, pending for future launch. Or it decides not to invent a new wheel. Anyhow, I would imagine Google+ has a lot of catch-up. It’s going to be a bumpy road ahead..

The good thing of having Google+ in the social networking maket is to offer users more choices, pushing Facebook to work faster and better to facilitate users’ needs. Similar to what we have seen in email usage – users can choose between Google mail, Yahoo mail and Hotmail or they can use all of them.

In a bid to grow faster in social network race, Google+ offers connection not only to Google, Yahoo and Hotmail, but also extends to Facebook through Chrome’s plugin. To fight back, Facebook is reported to block the plugin, preventing it from importing users data from Facebook to Google+.

TG finds the Internet world is increasingly amusing. We’ve seen the rise of internet tools taking our privacy away. Millions of users however are still diving into it, using these tools everyday on bus, cabs, MTR, almost everywhere. Not many of us seem to be aware of the hidden risk behind it.

Then there comes another tool claiming that it can give us back the control stick. We are the one who control your own profile, your groups and your communication.