Business Bytes
Renee Oricchio

Gloves Off: Facebook vs. Google

 

If you love watching two tech titans have a catfight, this is your month so far. Facebook and Google just got into the ring to duke it out.

Round One: Knowing Facebook was having a big announcement this week, Google chose to steal the limelight in advance by annoucing its long-awaited answer to Facebook, Google+. 

Round Two: Oh by the way, Google+ will feature video chat.

Round Three: Facebook had its launch, anyway, and was quick to mention that it has 750 million users worldwide (that would be 749,999,000 more million users than the 1,000 Google+ users who have signed up since last week.)

Round Four: Facebook is also launching online video chat by integrating Skype calling with its online chat client.

Round Five: Google+'s "Google Hangouts" will enable online video chatters to host multiple callers at the same time. Skype calls on Facebook are, for now, limited to two people at a time.

Round Six: Google Hangouts allows video chatters to watch YouTube videos together. Facebook-Skype can't do that yet. P.S. The Los Angeles Times is reporting rumors that Google is in talks to buy Hulu.

Round Seven: Google says "hold off" to businesses who want to create a company profile on Google+. It says it is working on a solution for that to come out by the end of the year. If you try to cobble by using a personal profile as a business profile in the meantime, Google will likely kill it out of the system anyway. So wait.

Round Eight: At this week's press event for the Facebook-Skype launch, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pretended to not be rattled by all of the Google buzz.  Press questions were brushed aside quickly with Zuckerberg rambling "I view a lot of this as validation as to how the next five years are going to play out." Huh?

Round Nine: In further efforts to rename every single proper noun in the galaxy to something that starts with Google, Google scrapped the names "Picassa" and "Blogger".  They will now be called "Google Photos" and "Google Blogs," respectively. Curiously, Google is calling "Google+" a "project" instead of a "product." Interpretations of that are welcome in the comments below.

Renee Oricchio is a technology writer and former supervising news producer for CNN Financial News. She has been covering the computer industry since 1987. @oricchio