When I am posting on Facebook, I am really not sure who will be reading my posts and who won’t. Sure, I can change the status of the posts to ‘only friends’ or ‘public’ and so on. But among friends, if I am addressing one friend of mine, I do not want others to read and read INTO that particular post.

Not that my posts are so ambiguous; there’s just a chance that while a given post makes perfect sense to one friend, it might make some horrible sense to another; and the chances for a misunderstanding multiply infinitely. Well, that hasn’t as yet happened, but I live in the fear it might.

Add to that the fact that Facebook can and will use your content in ways it sees fit as well as the overall lack of privacy of your content. I for one cannot ever allow that to happen. And I still use Facebook out of the dire need because some friends I want to communicate to are just not there on Google Plus.

Google or Facebook

Google Plus is therefore a more assured experience. Its ‘Circles’ ensure that you can communicate to a given group of friends in a particular idiom and sense while you communicate in quite different terms to another set. Quite a convenience, I must say!

So I searched online and came up with the following ways in which Google Plus can be considered a better platform to use than Facebook:

• It is relatively far simpler to use, once you have the hang of it.
• There’s better privacy on Google Plus; Circles, as previously mentioned, makes things far more convenient.
• Gmail, Google Voice, and Picasa integrate better with your Google Plus account.
• Your personal data is definitely safer on Google Plus. Google provides you privacy controls for every piece of information or content that you upload, that too in a way that’s easy to comprehend.
• You do not have to worry about which of your 200 friends in your five circles will get to read what post you uploaded. You can add all the friends you want to and never worry about any misunderstandings!

Apart from these five, I am just more comfortable using Google’s services as direct fallout of all the talk about privacy issues on Facebook.

Now, I don’t mean to underestimate the value of either platform because both are equally active about the kind of services they offer. Facebook will likely take steps to ensure that it offers better features to prevent its vast user base from slipping away to Google Plus.

In the meantime, if I were to start afresh, I’d choose Google Plus.