You are not encouraged to announce that you are divorced on Google plus, at least not in your official relationship status. For the first time, Google is asking its users about their occupation, education, places they’ve lived, contact information, and relationship status. The Google plus profile page has a place for you to state your relationship status as well as what you are “looking for.”

If you compare the Google plus relationship status options to the Facebook relationship status options, you’ll notice that on Facebook, you can choose to say that you are “separated” or “divorced.” On Google plus, however, you have the options “I don’t want to say,” “single,” “in a relationship,” “engaged,” “married,” “it’s complicated,” “in an open relationship,” “widowed,” “in a domestic partnership,” and “in a civil union.”

This ignores the fact that 10% of the population is divorced according to the most recent survey information from the US Census Bureau. Google has been criticized in the past for ignoring non-traditional relationships and families. For example, on Father’s Day, the company inserted “Call Dad” reminders into Gmail accounts. Some Google users were offended by this. One user commented, “I’m sure in a Google-designed childhood everyone would be loved, protected, and nurtured to be the best little software engineer he/she can be. However, I don’t appreciate the reminder of my unpleasant childhood and presumption that I want to speak to my father.”

It’s possible Google did not include “divorced” or “separated” relationship status options so as not to remind Google plus users of their unfortunate relationship statuses. Google plus does offer “civil unions” and “domestic partnerships,” though, as legal options for homosexual couples vary from state to state. Facebook only began offering these statuses a few months ago.

People have been wondering if they will be able to have group video chat sessions on Facebook’s new video chat feature. Unfortunately, there is no group video chat feature for Facebook’s video chat, which is powered by Skype. Apparently, one-on-one video chatting is a lot more popular than group chat on Skype. However, this is partially because group video chat on Skype costs money. At least one user in the group chat must be paying $4.49 per month for premium Skype service. Because of this, most Skype users opt for the free one-on-one video chats.

In Google Hangouts, group chat is the main feature. Also, it costs absolutely nothing, and up to ten people can be in one group chat at a time. The way it works is Google can actually detect which person is talking and focuses the video stream on them until someone else talks. Google Hangouts would be perfect for group meetings or even business meetings. This would be the perfect setting for having fun with a group of friends, meeting up with a discussion group, meeting up with a study group, etc.

However, if your main focus is one-on-one chatting, you might want to stick with another form of video chat. Google Hangouts can be a complicated set up for just two people to utilize. However, you don’t need to go to Skype or Facebook video chat to do this as Google has a video call feature separate from Google Hangouts that works better for one-on-one video chatting.

It could be easier to utilize Facebook video chat if all of your friends are also on Facebook. The new Facebook video chat can be launched right from your home page on Facebook or on someone’s profile page, and you won’t need to download Skype or register for a Skype account.

video chat in facebook

Facebook video chat along with Google Hangouts require downloads, but it’s a pretty simple process for both. For the moment, there seems to be no comparison between the two, and there is also no real product overlap. Facebook video chat works great for one-on-on chatting with friends and Google Hangouts is an excellent product for video chatting in a group setting.

It’s quite possible that Facebook will try to incorporate a group chat feature into the Facebook video chat at some point in the future, though, in order to keep up with Google Hangouts.

It’s a well known fact that building Facebook friend lists is cumbersome and many don’t know how to do it even after being in Facebook for more than a year. It’s more complicated when compared to google+ as you must first go to the “edit friends” menu, and then to “Create a list”, and then you have to go through a few more boring steps before you can actually create a list. In contrast, Google + which currently is in a field trial allows users to simply drag and drop friends into appropriate circles. You can then set the privacy settings for each cirlce without breaking a sweat.

Inspired by this easy-to-use google circles, top Facebook engineers including Peng Fan, Malkani, Brian Rosenthal and Vladimir Kolesnikov have started working on a tool called Circlehack which is aimed at making creating friend lists easy in facebook. With the field trial of google plus becoming an undisputed success, the onus is upon facebook to do something extra-ordinary to prevent them from becoming the next myspace.

As we all know google plus has already started working on the Google plus API and am sure that this is just the beginning of the war between Google plus and Facebook