It’s been said time and again that Google doesn’t hold the key to the Internet for most people anymore; it’s said that since many people are always on Facebook, the time will come one day when people just find it easier to search for things on the Internet from within Facebook – asking friends and so on. There’s also the matter that as a search engine, Google isn’t allowed to access the password-protected conversations that happen in Facebook. Those would be very valuable information Google could have on people’s personal preferences. It’s information that Google search business could really use.
Perhaps then it is understandable why when it comes to social networking, Google wants in very badly. They’ve tried finding success in social networking with their Orkut and Buzz services so far with miserable results more or less. Now, more than a year after they rolled Buzz out to complete consumer apathy more or less, they’re trying again. In the end of June, Google announced its new social networking service – something they call The Google + Project. Going by the tried and trusted lead to success in the marketplace that you need to differentiate yourself from your competitors, Google has a killer selling point – it wants to gives you powerful way out of having to deal with Facebook privacy issues.
If there’s one area in which Facebook has faced criticism in a very consistent way, it’s the way they deal with user privacy. Facebook users tend to find its settings rather complicated. The Google + Project has a rather interesting new way in which to approach social networking privacy. And the search giant hopes that it will make all the difference to users. It could be the best social networking software out there.
The way Google sees it, the problem with Facebook privacy issues is that Facebook doesn’t give you an intuitive way in which to guard your privacy. In regular life, it’s pretty easy to know who you’re sharing anything with. Whoever is right in front of you is whom you’re talking to; you just look around the room to see if there is anyone else there, you’re pretty much safe. In social networking though, there is no easy way “to look around the room”. Google wants to give you an easy and intuitive way of checking your privacy just the way you do when you need to say something to someone in private in real life.
A membership to a social networking site isn’t like any other kind of Internet service. It’s something you invest a lot of time in to build up. If you have a place to hang out in where all your friends are, why on Earth would you go to another place where none of your friends were? What would you do there? Even if you wanted all your friends to jump ship, how do you get them to do it? While Facebook privacy issues might bum you out, Face book has user inertia working for it.
Google doesn’t really hope to get people to switch loyalties from Facebook. Facebook only has a half billion members. For all the holdouts, Google hopes to be the social network of choice. It wants to attract them with its intuitive privacy policy.
It just might work.