Real Life Sharing rethought for the web

If you haven’t heard of Google+ or understand what exactly it is, don’t worry because you will know soon enough. Google+ is sweeping through the social media realm and is emerging as one of Facebook’s biggest rivals and achieving this in only a few short weeks since its inception. Launched at the beginning of this summer (June 28, 2011 to be exact), Google+ is a social media phenomenon reaching over 20 million users in three weeks.

? What is Google+
Google+ is the newest and fastest growing social media service and network owned and operated by Google Inc. Similar to Facebook, Google+ allows users to invite friends to create accounts, share pictures, and talk amongst friends through chats, videos and messages. Google+ users are able to easily access other Google applications such as Gmail, Calendar, Documents and Buzz from the main page.

? What does Google+ do
Google+ offers a wide variety of applications and services for users to communicate and share with others. Google+ introduces a list of new features and lingo for their social network:

Circles
A way to organize friends into groups named and selected by the user. The user is able to select friends and add them to the group, which allows group members to share information and chat in private. Each circle is private and only group members can see the list of names within the circle.

Hangouts
This feature is unique to Google+ and makes it possible for circles to group chat with one another. Hangouts have a 10-person limit for each video chat at a time.

Sparks
Similar to Google’s search engine, sparks evaluates the users interests and finds items on the Internet such as blogs, videos and books with those commonalities.

Huddle
Huddle works through the users cell phone for group messaging. The application is available for the Android, iPhone and SMS messaging.

Stream
Through Google+’s stream, users can update status, photos and videos for circle members to read and comment.

? Should we care about Google+
You should give Google+ try if you love Google, Gmail or any other Google related application and product, because you wont be disappointed. If you think you would be the only person on Google+ you are surely mistaken. Check out Facebook and look at your friends’ recent statues and I bet at least 10 people wrote a status about their Google+ account. Don’t hesitate – do it as soon as you’re done reading this. It’s simple and quick to set up your account and profile and with a couple clicks of the mouse you will be a Google+ pro in no time.