Google+ upstages Facebook

Like. That little word. Right now it's the most powerful word in the English language. Not just English, every language that Facebook is published in.

It's the little word that nearly 700million Facebookers use to, well, like something on the world's largest online community.

With one word, or the gesture it entails, you can register your vote. It's just a little nudge to say you approve. It's not as committal as leaving a comment. It's just one click of the mouse, one tap of the touchscreen.

It is Facebook's secret weapon. You like something. The cloud-based software robots that are the internet tell you what your friends liked. You go look. And Like!

It's a popularity contest. It is like friggin' high school all over again.

That like button is seemingly a better referral system than the almighty word-of-mouth. You can even organise an Arab Spring on it, apparently. Even if its executives have conceded what we already knew: Facebook's role was a little overblown.

But you helped to overthrow a few corrupt dictators in the north of Africa just with that one mouse click. Isn't technology great? Or so the mythology goes.

It's usually high food prices, autocratic tyrants who have overstayed their welcome by several decades and an unusual catalyst that spark the tinder house. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, it was a misread press statement that declared the border crossings open "with immediate effect".

Early this year, it was a painful moment of self-immolation in Tunisia, and a march after Friday mosque to Tahrir Square in Egypt that sparked revolutions. And a groundswell of the usual dictator-overthrowing social ingredients.

But Facebook and Twitter were there to show the world as it was updated by the participants on the ground. War reporting has never been so personal. Literally.

More immediate than the famous text blogs of the Salam Pax blogger in Beirut during the 2003 Gulf war. Grainy pictures taken with mobile phones, terrified status updates from the front of the crowds, and an immediacy to match the ferocity of the new instant-gratification generation of social media buzzkids. Yeah. Us.

Popularity counts. In these cases it's even helpful.

Now Google wants in on the action. It is also dying to tell you what your friends are up to. What stories they read and videos they watch. First there was +1 and now Google+.

Google appears to have re-invented its scrapped Wave project - which was just too geeky for most, and frankly pointless - into a way of having one-on-one chats or with a group of people.

Instead of Facebook's lists, Google+ has circles of friends, with different levels of access to whatever you share. Instead of your "news feed" there is a "stream". A new feature called "sparks" is for specific interests.

Perhaps the best summation I've read, by tech commentator Robert Scoble, is: "Your mom won't use Google+."

Right now it's a hangout for geeks, along with media types and other assorted early adopters. It's too soon to say if it will be a success or failure, but it's certainly getting a lot of attention. Google's last social media attempts (Buzz, Orkut and Wave) were abject failures. But the way we use the internet is changing fundamentally, driven by social media. The search giant, with about $30-billion in yearly revenues, knows it. Don't write it off.

The key thing Like and Google+ do is make you spend more time on the website (Google has one billion registered users, to Facebook's 700 million, although people spend half an hour more a day on the latter). That's important because advertisers like it. They can show you more ads.

Frankly, Like and now Google+ are highly superficial, and it is just going to get worse. We think we're engaging, we think we're participating, but we're just clicking a mouse. But, as Scoble says: "Please leave yo momma over on Facebook".

• Shapshak is editor of Stuff magazine