14 DAY TRIAL // While Google+ has been a hit, at least in some circles, it's no threat to Facebook. Yet. But Google+ is still growing and Facebook has to be feeling at least a bit nervous.
On paper, Google+ already has pretty much all of the core Facebook features and it's adding more. It also has some features that are better than Facebook's, again, from a technical point of view. It also has some distinctive features of its own.
If this was a bullet point list war, Google+ would match or better Facebook in most core social network features.
Google+ Photos is one example. When it came out, the photos section of Google+ had some pretty strong points going for it. The galleries and the viewer looked and worked better, with a few caveats.
But Facebook is not taking it lying down. It revamped the photos section last winter, well in advance of Google+ and it has now upped the ante again with a refreshed viewer and larger photos.
But how does it stack up to the Google+ viewer. The Google+ lightbox, which showcases individual photos, surrounded by a black edge, features a comments box, a slideshow list of photos in the album and that's pretty much it, at first glance.
There is a tag option, of course, and, from the actions menu, you can rotate the image or view more details about it. There are also several photos filters, so you can edit the image from Google+. The main image itself is 912 pixels wide.
The new Facebook viewer increases the image size, from 720 pixels to 960 pixels, more than Google+. Note that the screenshot displays the viewer with a 720 pixel image. It is otherwise identical with the updated one.
The Facebook viewer also enables you to comment on a photo and tag someone in it. There is also a "Download" link, but that only retrieves the image as seen in the viewer, not the original-sized one.
There's no download button in Google+, but you can 'right-click' save the image, something you can't do in Facebook. You can also access the original, full-size image if you visit Picasa Web.
Overall, the new Facebook viewer looks better and the white background feels more soothing than the black one used by Google+. While the black is used to better bring out the photo, the white version does a better job at that.
When it comes to the album view and management Google+ gets the top spot, at least from a visual point of view. But the lightbox viewer Facebook uses trumps Google+'s, at least for now.
In the end though, as Facebook aptly demonstrated, it's not the features or the capabilities that win the day. Facebook photos became the biggest photo host on the web not because it was better than the competition, but because it was relatively easy to use, social and already built into something people used, Facebook.
