War of Corporate Gullivers—Google Vs. Facebook #1

Can you afford to miss this front?

The two Industry social media titans are at war. Google had been ruling the Web seamlessly until Facebook stepped in. Now, they are known competitors; one trying endlessly to outshine the other. The tech-driven social war is now fully on!

The social sharing war is fully on.

The users, you and me, are warming up for a classic feud between these two Internet giants. If Google entered the group-buying domain with Google Offers, Facebook lagged no behind and entered the scenario with its Facebook Deals.

The epic battle does not stop here.

To shake the strongly anchored roots of Facebook in the social networking arena, Google launched its social networking site Google Plus in June, signing up more than 10 million users in the first two weeks. It’s interesting and surprising to note that Facebook took 852 days to get these many registered users. This seems like a real challenge to the gigantic vantage position of Facebook in the social networking space, I guess.

It's too early to say who will win this battle.

Google has already shown its prowess in the first 16 days to Facebook with such head huge start in the social networking arena. Facebook seems to be a bit startled and has even admitted to recruiting a renowned PR agency to circulate anti-Google stories in the media and Web.

In my opinion, Facebook has shown sheer immaturity in handling this neck-to neck competition. May be its executives are inefficient to handle such fierce social rivalry. This raises many questions about the competence and business maturity of the Facebook top management league. May be it’s growing too fast to be handled by it.

So is Facebook going to lose out this battle to Google? May be the comparative analysis of the features that I do later in this post helps you get a better view of the ongoing battle.

Competitive explosion of sign-ups & engagement

So what has made Google Plus win so many eye balls so soon? Its feature—Circles. You can use this feature to segregate your friends into different groups like family, friends, acquaintances etc. Now what’s the added advantage here? The in-built security benefit that facilitates you to share your posts selectively. Whereas on Facebook, you’re supposed to form a group and club all your friends together with same interests.

Now let’s talk about ‘Commenting’ on the two platforms. While on Facebook, you need to edit your Privacy settings to stop some of your friends from commenting on your posts, you’ve a smoother experience on Google Plus. Here, you can disable commenting for a specific post directly from your Stream. More so if you disable commenting on Facebook, it takes place for all your posts, whereas on Google Plus, you can do it for a specific post that you want.

Rapid evolution of Google+ has put a bee in Facebook bonnet.

Google Plus Sparks is definitely a feature that places Google above Facebook. It’s a unique way to stay abreast of all the latest information for the chosen topic. Facebook, however, is devoid of any such feature.

You may find me biased towards Google here but I find Facebook somewhat regulated by its incumbent technology approach, whereas Google is relatively more flexible in aligning its technology resources to the newer and unexplored zones.

This is my first post in the series of Google—Facebook war. I’m yet to say a lot more on this topic. So stay tuned for the post. II of the series.