Illustration by Alicia Toldi.
Time and time again, Google has attempted to expand its web empire into the realm of social networking. Try though it may, Google’s efforts in the form of Buzz, Wave and Orkut have failed thus far to touch Facebook’s monopoly. Google+ is almost certainly the site’s most ambitious attempt yet, claiming a more practical and integrated feature set than its chief competitor.
And Google+ certainly does have a lot to offer. Though it lacks some of the sharing options offered by Facebook, in particular newer auto-sharing features like Spotify and news reader, the site is actually about your friends. No, not those 600 people that you kind of knew in high school that now spam your news feed, but your actual friends. Every feature of the site is about making it easy to compartmentalize your friendships—aside from the Circles feature, which allows you to separate information-sharing based on what circle of connections you place friends in, Hangouts and Huddles focuses on group video and messaging chat rather than just one-on-one.
Though these features seem good enough on paper, this article won’t touch on how well the site actually functions. This is, simply put, because I don’t have any friends who use Google+. Sure, I added a few friends to my circles when I first got an account late this summer, but not a single new post has appeared in my Stream since August. This Google+ abandonment is one half of the vicious cycle that seems to be holding the site back, along with the absence of the aforementioned auto-sharing options that the Zuckerberg camp is so fond of.
Sure, auto-sharing may be a thinly veiled data mining scheme that sends all of your web activity to Facebook (who converts it to warehouses of hundred dollar bills with the help of advertisers), but if you’re even remotely concerned about your privacy you probably stopped using the site a few years ago. One could argue that it’s a bit evil of Facebook to sell all of your data without making this more clear, but maybe it’s a necessary evil. It’s the connections to everything from iPhoto and Photo
Booth to location-aware mobile activity that do such a good job of making sure you can’t forget that Facebook has you under its spell. Since the site already has a healthy portion of us invested in it, there are plenty of people to populate the newsfeed. It really is a vicious cycle, no doubt aided by the allure of that mindless newsfeed scrolling we can’t help but fall into every so often.
Auto-sharing is part of a bigger push toward developer integration that has completely altered the side in recent years, both for the end user and Facebook’s revenue stream. Though sharing of news and photos tends naturally to make up the meat of social networking, third party offerings from Farmville to Bumper Stickers have helped to diversify Facebook’s offerings.
Though it offers a limited catalogue of games, Google+ leans toward a closed ecosystem, populated primarily with Google-developed features. The logic here is pretty simple: Google’s open Android mobile platform has had trouble capturing the market with the ease that the closely-curated iOS has had. That being said, it may come to a matter of personal preference between Facebook’s unlimited catalogue of mostly mediocre applications or Google+’s small, integrated platform.
Though it would be tricky for Google to make its site as addicting as Facebook without jeopardizing privacy, it’s certainly possible. Considering Google’s sprawling monopoly over web interaction, they could do a better job of promoting use of the site. However, even if Google+ had the strongest possible set of features, there’s a chance it would take more than a strong competitor to dethrone Facebook. Facebook’s got an incomprehensible critical mass advantage that makes the notion of packing up and moving to Google+ a bit too much of a gamble for most users. At the rate Facebook has been under fire over privacy concerns, though, the wait may not be long before users have had enough. •
I think the view expressed is not complete, I myself am using both facebook and google + in two tabs simultaneously and like both. At facebook there is limitation for making friends because there is an instruction that if know the person then only you add request. Of course there are several friends which one has come across on the web site rather than in real life! I hardly find friends of my age and whom do I really know on both the sites. But at google + I get daily response from all over the world, people adding me in there circle daily on an average of 10 per day. and its not necessary to add them back but usually I add them back. This way come I across people of my interest and can view there posts, for example photos and music and art which I might not have ever watched or listened !
But that is just a VERY sad commentary on your life if you are using the internet to meet friends that you don’t know at all in real life. You have to understand that the vast majority of people have real lives that ARE worth living. They actually enjoy meeting and talking to people OFFline.
I honestly can’t IMAGINE how bad my suicidal thoughts would be if I ever work up one day and said “You know…I really would like to meet someone today. I think I will go on the internet to do so!”
Seriously, like get a life and make some real friends. Who needs the internet to do this stuff?
I mean, it’s almost as bad as posting comments on message boards then trying to characterize someone’s entire life based on a post you responded to. That’s soooooo laaaaaame.
I find this view very lacking. How can one review Google+ when he admits he doesn’t follow anybody? You can’t complain that a social site is empty if you don’t connect with people in it.
Google+ has a very different culture. It is really a way for people all over the world to connect through interests. With sparks and integrated search, it becomes an information hub where you can converse with others of the same interests. Because of circles you can speak to these people without privacy concerns.
Beyond this, it has the potential to tap into socialising with friends while Facebook doesn’t have the potential to mimic Google+’s culture. This coupled with the integration with all other Google products, he service is growing fast and has a bright future ahead of it.
Appaently you are not following the traffic numbers. Google+ is NOT growing. It is actually shrinking. Tell me how many long term success story websites have TWICE seen their traffic fall by 60%. Google+ has. First in August and then again in October. In fact, there has NEVER been organic growth on Google+. They have had just three periods of growth. The first was when it debuted. Obviously for the first 3-4 weeks it grew. Then after 5-6 weeks of steady decline, they got rid of the invite only sign ups. That brought on their second growth. But that lasted only TWO weeks before traffic started plummeting again for another month. So they opened it to Google App users and brands. And they saw another bump…but this was very VERY small, and again lasted only 2 weeks before the decline again.
Sorry, but it is very clear that people are simply not signing up for Google+, and those that do are not staying.
And by the way…people don’t WANT to connect with total strangers simply because they like origami. That is a VERY sad and pathetic notion. Most people like to make REAL friends. Which is why Facebook is popular.
If you are using the internet as a substitute for real like (rather than a supplement) then I have news for you…you don’t have a life to begin with.
This is a great example of Google’s stupidity and ego thinking that they can dictate what the market wants rather than adapting to what the market REALLY want. Users NEVER expressed an interest to be able to meet people with similar interests. Because no one cares. Certainly not enough people..which is why Google+ HAS so few members and even fewer ACTIVE members. Facebook now drives over a THOUSAND TIMES more referrals than Google+..seriously…just fathom that stat for a second. For every one time someone clicks a link on Google+, 1000 people do the same on Facebook.(Even though, supposedly, Facebook has only 20 times more users) And if people really wanted what you so delusionally think they would, then this would be reverse. If people wanted ot learn what others like, then they would be MORE likely to follow links from strangers. (And by the way..this ratio of Facebook referrals to Google+ referrals is getting LARGER…not smaller.)
Hey mr. web 2.0, there are plenty of community sites that exist where members have never met one another face to face.
In fact, many users HAVE (i can capitalize too) expressed interest in meeting people who have similar interests. Off the top of my head, we can think of all the dating sites that exist, or all the sites dedicated to health care and health related problems.
Just because FB is growing – no one is arguing that – doesn’t mean there isn’t a slice of the pie for others whether it’s G+ or not.
If this is a showdown, it is like when the US Navy went to Grenada.
I have to say, I find it amusing how people talk about “real” friends and Facebook, when so many people I know on there, and my own experience, shows me lists of people who they barely know, but add because of some tenuous link to someone they genuinely know. The criticism that Google+ is focused on people you barely know and Facebook is the opposite is really not something I can take as being anything but groundless. I have connected to people on G+ I know in real life, so I guess this idea that people don’t want to connect with strangers is somewhat correct. So I don’t follow strangers on G+. Funny how I can do that too.
I sure hope Google+ doesn’t grow to be as big as Facebook. Or, for that matter, to be anything like Facebook, which is frankly the one thing which would make me dump Google’s service in an instant. Really, are we expecting Google to have a rival social network to Facebook in barely six months of operating time compared to Facebook’s several years?
Some social media comparisons are meant to be done to find out which helps you better. Thanks and keep it coming.