Facebook Messenger and Google+

In the recent weeks two new social media services were released: Google+ and Facebook Messenger. As I like to at least know what the new media avenues are, I jumped right in to Google+, read a few tutorials and tried to see if it had any value to me. As with any social media network, the power is in the network and right now, not many people are using Google+. Apparently the information architecture and user experience are phenomenal, and even though I'm learning tons about both in my current job, I still don't see the elegance or superior functionality. The one big thing is the ability to group video chat as Google chat through is not capable of video chatting. I don't believe Facebook even has a video chat, Skype is not able to group video chat, and neither is iChat. That said, the service still has some kinks as the upload time is sluggish, picture quality grainy and likely to seize up. Time will tell whether people flock to Google+ to make it as powerful as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn currently are. Facebook Messenger is a service from Facebook designed to both aggregate all messaging capabilities from Facebook and serve as a text messaging alternative. The real value is in the second one. If I am able to communicate with enough friends and in the same capacity as text messaging, I can downgrade or potentially even eliminate my texting service, which saves me cold hard cash. To the phone providers who make boatloads of profit off of texting this should serve as a tangible threat. Once again we see the power of profit to attract entrants to the industry, driving down prices and reducing profit margins all to the benefit of the consumer.