Social | Virtual Thoughts

It was in the pipeline and its here finally: Games on Google+. Competing with the likes of Farmville, Mafiawars, CityVille etc on Facebook, Google+ aims to take a dig on Social Gaming. Currently it has dozens of games including ever popular Angry Birds, Sudoku puzzle, Zynga Poker, Crime City, Monsterworld, Dragons of Atlantis, Flood it, Bejewelled, Diamond Dash and others. You can invite your friends in the circles to play games and compete with them, post your scores or brag about it as well. You will first need to authorize the game app, which would mean allowing profile information access to those games. Currently games are not enabled by default for all and are being rolled out in phases.

Here is how you play games on Google+. On the Google Plus landing page, click on the Games tab and you are ready to roll 🙂

That’s not all, if you’re a developer and if interested in building games for Google+, you may want to take a look at Google+ developer blog. Expect to see barrage of messages from your friends across all circles to compete with them on these games. So what’s next from Google on Google+? Probably, ability to play these games within Google+ on the mobile platform(?)

With Google+ hogging all the limelight for features like Circles, Huddle and more importantly Group Video Chatting called Hangout, would Facebook be left behind? not at all. Facebook today launched a new feature called Facebook Video Calling that also allows group video chatting among your friends in Facebook through a collaboration with Skype

Facebook Video Calling requires an application/plugin to be downloaded and installed onto your PC and based on your internet connection it may take a while. Go to the link http://facebook.com/videocalling to get started. At the lower corner of the page you can even see your Facebook friends who have already enabled Video Calling to make it easier for you.

When we tested out the video calling feature it worked without any fuss and was very similar to Skype. Audio and Video streaming were of good quality, but then again if you are used to Skype this ain’t much different. As I said, this may not be a path breaking venture in comparison to Google’s Hangout which came out with a streamlined group video chatting. We may sooner or later see an update for Facebook’s app on mobile platforms like Android and iPhone and this may hold the key in the war of the Video Chats