5 Things Google+ Does Better than Facebook!

I like to use Facebook increasingly but that is mainly because, I tend to get more interaction from my friends on it. As a platform I prefer Google+. I’ve always felt, that the best social network experience would be Facebook data mixed with Google+ UI. Facebook might be many times bigger but there are still a few things that Google+ does a lot better.

#1. Search on Google+ better than Facebook

This is not surprising considering Google is the undisputed champion of search on the internet. On Google+ the search results are intuitive and far more helpful than Facebook.

Facebook display search results pushing brand pages. The posts do not show up in real-time and there is also distraction with unwanted information on the right hand column showing birthdays and photos shared long ago by friends. These things have nothing to do with the query I was searching.

#2. Easy to reduce noise on Google+

We can add users into Circles and reduce or optimize the number of updates shown on the main feed. This means if someone is updating Google+ a 100 times a day, I simply have to put him in a Circle from which I get minimal feeds.

Facebook does allow reducing the number of feeds and updates we get from friends. Unfortunately most of these need to be tweaked individually. The news feed on Facebook cannot be managed by bulk management of updates from friends.

#3. Viewing and Editing Photos

Even a hardcore Facebook fan would not say that Facebook is better at displaying photos than Google+. Facebook has actually copied their photo viewer design from Google+. On Facebook there are not photo editing options while on Google+ there are plenty of editing options.

#4. Online Chatting

I admit that Google has a lot more experience designing online chatting because of Gmail. Chatting with your friends on Google+ is pretty much a straight forward experience. It is nothing out of the world but still a lot better than Facebook. Facebook Chat for me is extremely unreliable. Sometimes while chatting the messages are received almost after 24 hours and at other times online friends are show offline.

#5. Hangouts

Google+ has this very innovative way to carry out group discussions between several individuals. The service called Hangout is baked into Google+ and works pretty impressively. I do not see anything similar on Facebook. Yes, there is video chatting but group chatting is still not possible.

I am not at all suggesting that Google+ is better than Facebook. Not by a long shot as it still has to prove itself as a social network. But it seems to put a very high premium on user experience and sadly Facebook probably lacks this insight. Next week I will try finding 5 things Facebook does a lot better than Google+.

Do drop in your comments about Google+ doing things better than Facebook.