Facebook or Google+?

Since its launch in February 2004, Facebook rapidly overtook its competitors to become the internet’s most popular and commercially valuable social media site. Today, with over 800 million users, it has become an essential platform for internet marketing as well. The new F8 upgrade, which replaces the traditional facebook page with a timeline, promises to take the site to a new level of functionality. Recognising the success of Facebook as an internet phenomenon and not to be outdone,Google has entered the fray with their own social media site – Google Plus. With its clean-cut design and easy to use features, this new social media site hopes to attract existing gmail users by offering enhanced privacy options not yet available on Facebook. The Google+ Circles of Trust The feature that sets Google Plus apart from Facebook is the ability to divide contacts into categories such as friends, family, and acquaintances. This feature allows you to customise your front page and wall for each category, limiting the amount of personal information that people who don’t know you that well will be able to see. The circle system will appeal to privacy-loving users as well as business users who don’t necessarily want to share every post on their walls with colleagues and acquaintances. In response to this innovation by Google, Facebook now allows users to customise some of their displayed information and wall posts according to categories of friends – Facebook contacts can now be divided into friends and close friends and each blog post can be customised so that it may only be read by close friends. Facebook’s Timeline The latest innovation from Facebook is the gradual replacement of the Facebook page with something known as a timeline – a running list of all your Facebook activity from your first-ever post to the present. This new innovation means that users will have to review their history to ensure a clean social networking identity.