- Comparing Features, Head to Head
- What Facebook Offers That Google+ Doesnt
- What Google+ Offers That Facebook Doesnt
- Doing the Same Things, Differently
- Two Different Approaches to Social Interaction
- Who Wins?
What Facebook Offers That Google+ Doesn’t
Now let’s focus on what’s different between Google+ and Facebook, starting with Facebook. It’s a short list.
First, Facebook offers an Events feature that lets you schedule meetings and parties and such on Facebook, and even invite your friends to events. Google+ offers nothing similar, at least not yet. (It wouldn’t be surprising to see Google integrate the functionality of its Google Calendar app into Google+, but it’s not there yet.)
Facebook also offers special pages for celebrities and businesses. That is, a musician or actor or company can start its own page on the Facebook site, and use that page to market to its fans or customers. Google+ does not yet offer celebrity or company profiles, but undoubtedly will sometime in the future. (Google is rumored to be testing these types of profiles.)
In addition, Facebook offers a lot of third-party apps and games that enhance the site’s functionality. While Google+ does offer a Games page, it doesn’t yet have the quantity of social games you can find on Facebook. And there’re aren’t any Google+ apps as of yet, so Facebook holds the advantage there.
Finally, Facebook offers mobile apps for every major smartphone platform, including Windows Phone and Blackberry. As of the middle of August, Google+ only has Android and iPhone apps availablealthough a Windows Phone apps is rumored to be close to release.