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"What a day. In the space of a few short hours, Google+ wrenched open the floodgates, allowing anyone to sign up for the fledgling social network \u2014 while Facebook retooled its News Feed so you won\u2019t miss any of your friend's vital updates. \nalmost 20 million users and no way of finding anything. I have no idea why Google waited to introduce search until Google+ was out of the hands of Google\u2019s more trusted web cognoscenti\u2019 audience. We could have debugged it for them. The company also managed to bury the lead, putting the fact that registration for Google+ is now open to the masses near the end of its announcement.\nFacebook took one look at what Google was doing with the only social network that can really challenge it, and jumped. It announced changes to the News Feed that might have waited until the start of the f8 developers conference, which begins Thursday.\nAs I\u2019ve said before, Facebook\u2019s lead in the social space is beyond substantial \u2014 but clearly the company feels the heat. Google+\u2019s wealth of announcements and features makes it, I think, instantly competitive with Facebook. Even so, Google+ is so rich that it could overwhelm typical Facebook users who want to confine their usage patterns to the Facebook tools they know and love. \nGoogle's Hangouts, for instance, is pretty much a standalone application. Look at all the things you can do with it: \n\nHold hangouts via Android smartphone\t\nShare your screen\t\nDraw together\t\nCreate and edit documents together\t\nHold topic-based hangouts\t\nRun your own TV network\n\nOkay, that last one was an exaggeration, but there is the aforementioned new broadcast feature. You and up to nine of your friends can hold a Hangout and then broadcast it to the world. Google picked a few stars, like Will.i.am, to run some of the early ones.\nThere is some one-upmanship in the moves between Google and Facebook, to put it mildly. Google believes in Google+ and sees an opportunity to grab some market share from the still-hot, but relatively mature Facebook.\nFacebook has a roadmap, so it\u2019s doing more than simply reacting. But you know there has to be some tension in their Palo Alto offices.\nThe next few weeks and months will be especially telling for Google+. It\u2019s been populated with a ton of early adopters and tech-savvy folks. It\u2019s like its entire audience consists of One Percenters. What happens when average people join and do what they often do: look around and leave? It took years for Facebook to build up the level of interaction it enjoys today. Google+ Circles will encourage close-knit community interaction, but how will those weaned on ad-hoc groups like Google's more rigid circles of trust? \nOn Facebook, most people use little of the rich feature set and have scant patience for all the settings. In fact, most don\u2019t even bother with them (how often do you see photos that you know your friends never intended to share?).  Google+\u2019s feature set is more organized, but also pretty highly visible. Will this encourage usage or turn people off in the end?\nI don\u2019t know \u2014 I\u2019m too busy sitting ringside, watching the Facebook vs. Google+ bout and enjoying the show."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/09/20/google-vs-facebook-the-gloves-are-off-opinion/>