Google+ Is Making Facebook Better

Facebook unleashed a batch of updates, new features and tweaks to its site. While the features are being rolled out gradually, starting tomorrow, they'll make it easier to control your privacy settings and also give more control over who sees what.

All the changes are a big improvement over how Facebook used to do things and many of them have been requested by many users for years.

A win for users then, but the timing is interesting, all of these features, some that have been seen as problems by plenty of users for plenty of time, have been fixed only shortly after Google+ was launched.

There is a striking similarity between some of the features and how Google+ handles the same things. The inline editing and privacy options for the profile page is one example. More granular sharing is another.

But Facebook says that the changes have nothing to do with Google+ and have been in the works for many months now. It says, it wished it could move this fast in response to Google+ or anything else.

It is very likely that Facebook has been working on some of the features and changes long before Google+ was made available to the public.

Then again Google+ itself has been around long before it was made available to the public, the site was open Googlers at least a few months in advance of the public roll out. And early versions of it have been around since last fall.

What's more, everyone knew that Google was building something for social networking. Even if Facebook had no idea what Google was doing, it was pretty obvious that it was going to tackle what users disliked the most about Facebook and that's exactly what the social network fixed today.

It really doesn't matter though, if the new features show anything is that competition is good. While Google+ may never overtake Facebook, or maybe something else entirely will come along and dwarf both, the simple fact that Google has managed to get quite a lot of attention with its new website signaled to Facebook that it had to fight to maintain its dominant position.