Facebook has lined up a number of controls which can be debatable compared to its rival Google+. The new additions have sharing, tagging and privacy controls. These updates have a lot many similarities with Google+ features. Facebook however says that the similarity is not intentional as they have been working on for months to get these controls in their social networking site. Facebook even said that they were working on these controls way before Google+ was out. Additionally, they have kept in mind the user feedbacks who had many such improvements in their minds.
Facebook has been many a times criticized for user control and privacy relating to content sharing. These were in fact considered as the most advantageous points for Google+. Now Google+ has only one basic advantage over Facebook which is the ‘Circles’. So there is one question which a social networking user would cry out loud, that is, “Does it kill Google+?” The answer might not be affirmative, but to prevent it to turn towards affirmation, Google+ will have to come up with many innovations to compete with the social networking giant.
However, the controls added in by Facebook are detailed as below:
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Making privacy and sharing controls more explicit (rather than several clicks away)
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Making those sharing controls available on an update by update basis, inline
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Offering users more control over photo tagging and choice over what content appears on their profiles
These features turn out to be an advantage for the users because they would get the authority to control and manage their profiles in a much better way. The control can be accessed for one’s each and every status update, post or even photo. The options available now would be to make it ‘public’, shared only with friends or shared with custom groups. Making it public is same as ‘everyone’ option which was there earlier on Facebook. Facebook has interestingly added an option for the users to view their profiles as a third party, so that they can get a confirmation that the profiles looks as they wanted it for others who can be classified as employers, would-be employers, colleagues, parents and so on.
Talking about these new options in general, one can still think that the features are inspired from Facebook. But other way round there were even claims that Google+ has an inspiration from the social networking giant. On the other hand, Facebook has integrated a few options which the Google+ users have been still unaware off.
Facebook made many a users happy with its ‘Remove Tag’ feature. Earlier if a user was tagged by their parties, then the notification would pop up in the news feed of a user. Now there is an option for a user to accept the tag if they want to or prevent it if they do not want the image to reflect in their news feed. This would however not prevent the third party from making the tag. The tag would be live and kicking, but it would not show up in the user’s news feed. This could be a relieving option for many users who get tagged from third parties.
The tagging options are even flexible as one would now have an option to tag locations which can be noticeable as the location can be manually tagged by the user. However, this option is even for those who plan to post their future plans to others. For example, if someone plans to go to Hawaii, they can say “I’m going to Hawaii next week; here’s a photo of the hotel” and can associate the location with it.