Week 6: REFLECT -- Lots of people thought Google+ would be a Facebook killer. Do you use Google+? Is it a Facebook killer, or is there another SNS that will take Facebook out?

Image: http://www.androidguys.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/google+_720.png

I'm a little biased here with the endless stream of tweets coming out of my Twitter account, but I personally believe Facebook is on the way out. ABC News, Washington Post and a slew of other places posted articles earlier this year echoing my sentiments. The Goliath is falling hard under the weight of its own gravity with all the ads, the frankly bizarre calculations of what should appear at the top of the news feeds, the revelations that Mark Zuckerberg really doesn't care about privacy much.

The site is becoming infected by the amount of companies scrambling to make some moolah from users by slapping the fan page all across the Facebook network. People like me are slowly moving onto places like Google+ and Twitter, where information is still curated largely by you, the user. Twitter still ardently respects user privacy, even when it comes to Wikileaks, an organisation that made its name as a bad word for any first world government.

Google+ is I think the next Facebook. Its design is smarter, the privacy controls better, the choice of whom receives status updates is easier to define, the colour scheme is nowhere as bland as the blue and white. Google is constantly listening to the community and tailoring the layout based on that. And what's the best thing is Google Hangouts. Video calling for multiple people. You don't need Skype when what is on offer in Skype as a paid membership can be freely attained in Google+. People haven't caught on to Google+ yet, mainly because so many are on Facebook and pop culture still centres around there. One subject in this course takes place on Google+. Nobody has voiced concern over its use, whereas I know a few took issue with needing to sign up for Facebook for a few subjects in this course. Google+ is simple to use. It will be the social network where you put your expanded information (type anything over 140 characters to friends).

Twitter, on the other hand, is already booming. You can reveal as much or as little as you like on the site, depending on where your over sharing line is. There is a private Twitter function, where nobody can access your tweets unless they have your express permission to follow. Twitter defends your privacy and fights subpoenas, even if that privacy also belongs to racist assholes. Recently, there were issues surrounding Twitter's privacy giving trolls an easy and anonymous way to post rape threats to women. Thankfully, Twitter has revised its privacy policies to exclude that behaviour.

In all, Twitter currently looks like this:



And this is Google+, with its small (but massively growing) user base of mainly geeks and social elites:



And this, sadly, is Facebook at the moment: