Google+ is Out of Beta

The same week that Facebook rolled out its big changes, Google announced that their social network, Google +, was coming out of beta. After approximately 3 months in beta, Google opened up Google+ to anyone. In the first 4 weeks of its launch, Google+ had 25 million unique visitors. That number is for visitors, not registered users. Facebook, by comparison, has over 750 million registered users and in the last month had more than 500 million people log on.

One of the key distinctions of Google+ is the concept of circles, as in circles of friends. From the start, Google+ steers users towards assigning all of the contacts they accept into specific circles: close friends, family members, coworkers, former classmates, etc. The user then sets up different levels of sharing with the various circles, presumably leading to fewer embarrassing college party photos being made available to prospective employers. Facebook has had the same capability all along, but they’ve never pushed it as a central part of the Facebook experience, instead leaving it up the user to define the levels of sharing.