After a long testing, Google+ is now open for all.
It was previously available only on an invitation only basis. Google claims that it has attracted more than 10 million users just after 2-weeks of its invitation-only trail opening. Lot of improvements in other social networking sites indicates that the rise of Google+ has not gone unnoticed by its competitors.
In a blog post by Vic Gundotra, Google’s Senior Vice President of Engineering, wrote “The Google+ project has been in field trial for just under 90 days, and in that time we’ve made 91 different improvements (many of which are posted here). Google+ is still in its infancy, of course, but we’re more excited than ever to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. Today we’re releasing nine more features that get us that much closer.”
“For the past 12 weeks we’ve been in field trial, and during that time we’ve listened and learned a great deal. We’re nowhere near done, but with the improvements we’ve made so far we’re ready to move from field trial to beta, and introduce our 100th feature: open signups. This way anyone can visit google.com/+, join the project and connect with the people they care about”, he added.
People are already engaged with Facebook and Twitter to connect with the world. Will this service help them to do more? Rory Cellan-Jones, Technology correspondent, BBC News wrote in a news article “The big question is whether the 750 million people who currently use Facebook and the 100 million who are signed up to Twitter will decide they need to move.”
Facebook recently rolled out some new features including the ability to organise your friends into groups (like Circles in Google Plus) and a new “Subscribe” option which is rather similar to Twitter. Is Facebook trying to offer all of the best extract of features from various services to its users at one place?
Earlier a social service Buzz was launched in February 2010 by Google which fails completely to user expectation. In starting of September, Google closed its 10 services stating that it will help them to devote more resources to ‘higher-impact products’. May be they would like to really improve only those services which have higher peaks in web market.