Google Plus: can it succeed?

Google's Eric Schmidt told reporters at the Allen & Co media conference in Sun Valley that Google Plus is becoming an integral aspect of the business. “The whole company is ramping up on top of it.” he said.

Google Plus is a serious effect by the organisation to challenge Facebook in the social networking sector. Schmidt said that the integration is paramount to the success “The assumption is that everything will move over to using the Plus infrastructure over time. We’re trying to use the identity infrastructure to make the Google products really interesting.”

So far Google Plus hasn't been widely adopted, because Google have only sent out a limited number of invites, so they can continue with squashing bugs before the masses get their hands on it. He added “There have been a couple of privacy bugs, which were fixed within a few days.”

Schmidt was also keen to point out that this is not a copy of Facebook, and it was never intended to be.

“If you read the reviews, people seem to understand that it’s somewhat different from Facebook. We have a somewhat different view of privacy. The privacy defaults are different, the way we handle it is different.”

Circles, a part of Plus which lets users select specific groups of people to share information with is also going to be shared between Gmail and Buzz. “All the products in the company will evolve the Circles function” Schmidt said.

He also said that Google have wanted to work with Facebook and Twitter, on sharing information and becoming linked together, but he said, to this point that the companies had not been able to agree on a plan.

Kitguru says: A new option for social networking? Taking on Facebook in this sector is very tough as they have such a firm foothold already.

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