How Google Can Trump Facebook

Google's new plunge into social networking hasn't exactly been met with unanimous praise in the tech world. But Ezra Klein at the Washington Post sees one distinct advantage that Google+ has over goliath Facebook: It gives people "the opportunity to start over online," he writes. Facebook has evolved several times from its frat party ethos in the early days, and that can make things tricky: "I, for one, have mostly stopped using mine," writes Klein. "I don’t want to annoy my acquaintances with the content I want to send my closer friends, nor do I want to annoy my closer friends with the content suitable for my acquaintances."

Google+ doesn't necessarily have better tech features or a better vision of social networking. But it does offer the chance to "build your social network with years of Facebook experience in mind, rather than having to face the accretion of mistakes and miscalculations you made over almost a decade of trial-and-error with a new technology." (More Google Plus stories.)