Google introduces Google+, enters social networking battle

Google launched its social networking service called Google+ which is available at plus.google.com but is currently available to limited users. Google has promised to make this product available to everyone soon.

"Online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it," Google's senior vice president for engineering Vic Gundotra said in a blog post. Gundotra further explained, "We'd like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software," he said. "We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships and your interests".

"Not all relationships are created equal," Gundotra said. "The problem is that today's online services turn friendship into fast food -- wrapping everyone in 'friend' paper -- and sharing really suffers," he continued. 

Features available in Google+ includes Hangouts, Circles, Sparks and Huddle. ‘Hangout’ is a tool for video chatting among friends while ‘Spark’ is a sharing engine to share content from the web. 

‘Circles’ is another key tool and considered as Google’s enhanced form of Facebook’s ‘Friends’. it gives users to separate online friends and family into different "circles," or networks, and to share information only with members of a particular circle. Google+ describes the feature on the member’s homepage as “The easiest way to share some things with college buddies, others with your parents and almost nothing with your boss.”  

Google+ is considered as a rival of social networking giant ‘Facebook’ which nearly has 700 million users worldwide.