14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was the one that unveiled the new video calling feature in a press event. But, while the announcement was interesting in itself, a lot of people were very interested in the elephant in the room, Google+ and its video chat feature, Hangouts.
Zuckerberg deflected questions about Google+ as best as he could, but he did make a few remarks. The overall tone was that everything on the web needs to be social and that Google+ is just Google realizing this, six years after he did.
He believes that the past five years have been building up to this point, he built and grew Facebook into the behemoth it is today and, from now on, the social graph can be leveraged to make everything else better and more social.
This is what the Facebook Like, Instant Personalization, Facebook Connect and all of the other tools for third-party websites aim to do, add a social layer to the web.
This is exactly what Google is doing with Google+, except it's trying to build its own social service to power it, instead of Facebook's.
Zuckerberg didn't seem too worried about Google+ and he wasn't overtly critical either. He added that Facebook will continue to focus on its vision, implying that Google+ was not really a threat.
Facebook's co-founder and CEO created a Google+ account soon after the social network launched and is the most followed person on the site, despite not making any public comments.
Zuckerberg did take a subtle jab at Google+ and its core feature Circles. He believes that users don't want the hassle of managing their friends, grouping and putting them into categories, implying that Circles is not a solution that will take hold.
Facebook has tried and failed to get people to separate their friends into different groups. The latest solution is Facebook Groups which relies on a few users creating groups for everyone else. Zuckerberg said that while 5 percent of users create groups, 50 percent are using the feature, being added by others.