With Google’s new and updated look, the launch of Plus One, the Plus social network and their recent PageRank update, they are definitely planning something big. The major search engine want their monopoly back in the start of a war with Facebook. If you really think about it, Google owns all the information about anything and everything; except you. But guess what, there’s another giant out there who probably does know everything about you, and that’s Facebook. What’s going on with the two and why is there a constant battle for our data?
You know exactly what’s going to happen now, Google already runs the social network Orkut, they have profile information for quite a bit of their visitors and they can now get their own social opinions called +1 which helps quality websites climb up the pages. But that’s nowhere near enough to compete with Facebook which currently dominates the worlds social networking.
The new network currently goes by the name of the Google+ Project. If you’ve seen their video the interface looks great, but it’s a little different. Using Facebook, you usually just add the friends you know, using Google+, you assign the people you know into ‘circles’ to separate different groups of people. It’s a bad idea as well as a good one, it’s bad because from the video it looks as if you want to hide something from one group that you’d be happy with the other group seeing; it’s like having different personalities.
The difference with others such as Twitter is that it’s simple, either you hide your updates or share them with the world so you can connect to the world and the people around you. So it depends on what you intend to use social networks for and it looks like Google is missing a piece of the puzzle. Once you have all the information on the web and all the information about the people in the world including what they do, what they like, who they know and more you never know if you could trust a company with all that power. It’s great because some of the good things they can do is adjust the world around you to suit your needs. Soon, even Adwords will have +1 implemented so advertisements will be affected by social opinion which can be good or bad for companies and organisations.
What they are doing and how to keep secure
The two companies are closely linked to government organisations which you probably didn’t know. It states in Facebook’s Privacy Policy that they even go as far as collecting information about you from other sources, newspapers and instant messaging services. They do this weather you use their website or not! If you read more into their legal terms you’ll find that they can pretty much do anything they want with your information including selling it to ‘trusted’ third parties and indirectly all this data is being collected by the Information Awareness Office in the U.S. who may already know more about you than you do yourself.
So make sure you read any legal print, even if it isn’t a web based service. The networking giants are most definitely up to something, weather it’s to improve our lives, or to have digital copies of people; that’s a huge amount of power in their hands and your choice to trust them or not. Perhaps it’s better not be using these social networks, they say they keep people connected, but only in a virtual world, it probably prevents a lot of people from going outside and really connecting. Twitter isn’t too bad because there’s nothing to hide, it connects businesses and people for the better.
If you are going to use other ones there is a temporary fix, make sure you have set the strictest privacy settings, double check what can be seen in the public and don’t give out too much information. People have different views, but you can never know who to trust.
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