Adi's Tech Site

Just last night Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage to announce yet another new feature which is going to be rolled out very soon called Graph Search.  The way that it works is you will be able to search for things such as people who are in London that like PC games.  You could also search for people in Paris who work for a certain company. This new search feature will of course draw on the massive amount of data that is already available on Facebook.  When it cannot find something inside of Facebook it will then search using Microsoft’s Bing search engine.  You have to get an invite in order to use it right now but this feature will roll out to everyone else very slowly.

There is a lot of talk doing the rounds already that Facebook is trying to compete with Google.  However, the Facebook CEO has already said that he has no intentions on competing with Google.  I personally don’t see this feature as a competitor to Google.  Instead, I see this as an extension of Facebook’s capabilities. Additionally this is another way for advertisers to harvest Facebook’s huge user base.

Facebook is currently the world’s biggest social network with over 800 billion users worldwide. Today, the social network went public and started selling shares on the Nasdaq stock market with the symbol FB.  Today they opened up at approximately $38 a share(approximately £24 a share), hit a high of $45 a share(£28 a share) before going back down to $38. This gave them a market value of $104 billion(£66 billion).

I don’t know about you, but I have no plans at this time to buy shares from any tech company. That being said, I think that this is not a bad day’s work for the world’s largest social network.

If you have not noticed it already, Google has rolled out a lot of interesting changes to Google+(their social network).

As shown in the screenshot, the whole interface for Google+ has had an overhaul. To start things off, you have some of your Gmail contacts on the right hand side. As before clicking on them will open up a Chat window for that contact.

The main menu bar with all of the different sections of the site has been moved from the top of the page to the left hand side. It is now a sidebar. Not only that, but you can also move the icons on this sidebar to different positions.

Your profile page has also been slightly changed. It looks slightly like Facebook’s timeline feature.

In the second section from the right, you will see the different things which are trending.  It also shows people who you might know and people or companies that you might want to follow.

In addition to that, you have a hangouts section where you can find different hangouts to participate in.

I’ve had about 30 minutes to play around with the new layout and I have to say that normally I complain when a social network changes their layout.  That being said, I think that I actually like this new layout. A lot of people have already said that the whitespace is a problem especially on bigger screens or wide screen monitors. However, i’m not bothered about the whitespace.  All-in-all I am actually feeling pretty comfortable with the new Google+ layout.

So have you had a chance to play with the new Google+ layout yet? If you have, then what do you think of it?