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Over the last decade, the scope and importance of social networking has grown leaps and bounds. The position of Facebook in social media marketing has remained unshakable and non-controversial.

Google+: On several occasions, Google has attempted to penetrate the realm of social networking with google buzz which had little success. However, Google+ appears to be a serious contender now to Facebook and is expected to have a gradual but steady growth in market share in the social media networking world. Google plus is already steadily growing in popularity.

How Does Google+ Work, and how does it differ from the others.
Google and Social Networking
Google’s history with social networking is quite long and historical. Google’s earliest social networking platform attempt is “Orkut”; and was the most successful of all Google’s attempt to have its own social networking platform. This platform was never used much in the United States. However, Orkut was and is still popular in places like Brazil, till date.

Friend Connect was another attempt by Google to own a social media platform. This was launched in 2008. This technique was similar to MySpace or Facebook social network. However, there was a slight difference; Friend connect employed open standards in creating the platform across a wide range of accounts as well as websites.

Open Social is yet another of Google’s several attempts to own a social media network. Technically, this network launched in 2007, does not reflect social platform in itself. The program, along with MySpace tried to come up with a common programming interface that is applicable to a wide range of social platforms, so that programmers can incorporate the networks into websites as well as other web applications. However, Facebook features have beaten this attempt hands down.

Google Lively is among the list of social media platforms that Google has tried to set up. The primary reason of this platform is to enable the user logins using their personas, in order to connect and interact with one another. The program was discontinued too soon, it only existed for a few months.

Other social medial networking attempts by Google include Google Wave and Google Buzz. All these platforms were short-lived.

The core concept of the technique in Google+ is termed as ‘Circles’. This concept is also the most outstanding features of Google Plus compared to Google’s competitors.

This these circles work;
if you wish to communicate with people, they will go into your ‘circle’ or more than one circle, or, to the circles of group of people that are known to you. Thus, it is possible to have a circle of co-workers, circle of friends, circle of family members, and so on.

Only you can view the people in your circle. You will also decide the circles to share contents with, during the course of writing a status update. This makes Google plus a flexible network in terms of privacy setting management. Even Facebook does not have such flexible privacy setting – in fact, privacy setting is complex in Facebook.

This latest attempt of Google+ is starting to generate waves; will it live on and compete with Facebook and other social media networks? Only time will tell.