Innovations in social media are a bit like buses right now…You wait months for any significant progressions, then suddenly a stream of them career around the corner at once.

Perhaps the most significant of these is the launch of Google’s social platform, Google+.  The new “project” (as it’s touted) aims, at its core, to merge search and social together whilst (among other new functions) allowing the user to group their friends into separate “Circles” (Google Circles)

The evolution of Circles is a solution to what has become a fundamental frustration in the way contacts are grouped in many social networks: people don’t have one friendship group, they have many. Rarely would these groups have crossed paths in the off-line world, yet suddenly they were lumped together without a simple mechanism to filter content between them. It is, after all, uncomfortable to think that the same information you share with your old University mates could also be viewed by your discerning mother-in-law (remember that photo!)

Circles addresses this frustration by allowing the user to segment their contacts into relationship clusters; it recognizes that “friends” are not all equal, and when it comes to content sharing, one size does not fit all. The Circles function is even more relevant in light of a recent study by Pew, which claims that the average Facebook user has never even met 7% of their Facebook “friends” in real life, which means that on average about 16 people on a given Facebook friends list are actually more like strangers. Further to that, users on average have only met 3% of their list (around 7 people) once.

Creating relationship clusters is not a new concept; many of the newer social networks have arisen around this framework. Diaspora is a network that lets the user sort their connections into groups called “aspects” whilst also allowing the user to retain the rights to all their content; in other words, a focus on personalisation and privacy.

Another network to follow this trend (and perhaps, I think, the most impressive of the newer social start-ups) is Path. A mobile-only application, it describes itself not as a social network, but as a personal network. This personalisation is epitomised through the limitation of your network to 50 friends (based on “Dunbar’s Number”: a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people a person can maintain stable social relationships with at any one time). As they put it: “Path is a place where you can be yourself.”

There are plenty of others arising all the time, most of which tend to fall between one of two camps:

1) “Boutique” apps (often mobile based) with a focus on niche, common interests (i.e. Color, a mobile app that allows users to connect to anyone within their immediate physical proximity).

2) Personal networks (such as Path), with a focus on user privacy and a controlled, divisible network of contacts.

These two groups indicate that the future of social networking is likely to centre on building bespoke frameworks to accommodate our bespoke relationships, something which Google+ welcomes with Circles.

The search giant’s exploration into social clearly rattled Facebook; the Facebook Friend Exporter function was immediately disabled to prevent any easy migration of a user’s friends from the platform. Right now, it remains essential to have a Facebook strategy, but Google+ is another reminder that, equally, there shouldn’t be an over-reliance on one. For example, for the recent launch of the Absolute Radio Account (as part of a new pioneering Absolute Radio venture – Media Week) OGS labs decided it would be beneficial to use Facebook Register (a lighter Facebook Connect) in order to simplify the sign-up process without alienating those not on the platform, or those leaving it.

But Facebook are far from waving the white flag; it’s already redefined global communication and social culture once and it could well do it again. Enter Zuckerberg and the announcement of Facebook hitting 750 million users worldwide and a long rumoured tie-up with Skype (with Spotify expected to follow). Unlike Google+ Hangout, Facebook’s video chat service connects only two users face-to-face. The integration of a personal Skype service appears to be a return to form for Facebook and back to what made it a phenomenon in the first place, namely relationships and the way we communicate and share information. Zuckerberg himself echoed this when he announced the Skype integration, stating that the total number of active users is no longer a useful measure of the site’s success, but instead the amount of sharing (photos, videos, links etc) is a better indication of how people engage with the site.

Innovation is best served by a competitive market, and the launch of Google into the social space as well as the fast emerging array of social start-ups is likely to lead to a fascinating few months ahead. The gloves are off, and with Facebook’s integration of Skype’s one-to-one video messaging service and Google+ Circles it would appear that the battle for social supremacy is, in more ways than one, about to become personal.