Google+, the new kid on the social networking block, is attracting a massive amount of attention. So did Google’s previous attempts to break into this market, including Orkut (2004), Open Social (2007), Friend Connect (2008), Wave (2009), and Buzz (2010). However, Google+ is unlikely to suffer the same fate as these ultimately feeble efforts: it’s a massive “bet the company” investment, something like the Death Star in Star Wars. Google’s superlaser is aimed at Facebook, but plenty of minor planets could get destroyed as well, including Twitter, Flickr, Quora, and what remains of Second Life and FriendFeed. This is serious stuff.
The good news is that Google+ is paradise for nerds. The bad news is that Google+ is paradise for nerds. If you are like Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, you’ll feel right at home. This could change when the population expands from its almost all-male cadre of social networking mavens, web developers and tech journalists, but don’t bet on that. Google+ is the social network built by geeks for geeks. It’s no surprise that the most popular person on Google+ is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Alpha-nerd and blogger Robert Scoble nailed it straight away in a post about “Why yo momma won’t use Google+”. He says he “tried to get some normal users into the product, starting with my wife (we argued for 45 minutes about it)” before deciding that Google+ doesn’t need normal people. “We geeks and early adopters and social media gurus need a place to talk free of folks who think Justin Bieber is the second coming of Christ. That’s what we have in Google+ right now. Do we really want to mess that up?”
http://scobleizer.com/2011/07/01/why-yo-momma-wont-use-google-and-why-that-thrills-me-to-no-end/
The problem is that unlike Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Reddit and most other successful sites, Google+ doesn’t have a simple and obvious reason for existing, apart from using your personal data to make a ton of money. Google has mostly cloned what other sites do, without offering much that’s genuinely new. Like Facebook, it has a profile page, though Google+ simply re-uses your existing Google Profile page — the one you didn’t bother to create, because it was pointless. It has Streams, which are like Facebook’s news pages, or even more like FriendFeed. It has Circles, which are like Facebook’s friend lists (which nobody uses because they’re too much work) or a long-form version of Twitter Lists. It has Sparks, which are like Google Alerts, but you probably don’t use those either.
Google+ does have Hangouts, which enables you to have a live video chat with up to 10 people, but Second Life has had much the same feature for years, as does Skype. If you have a few close friends or distant family members, Hangouts could work really well. If you’re just being sucked into a Circle that someone else put together for their own peculiar reasons, it’s more likely to be a disaster.
Facebook doesn’t have Hangouts, but I expect Zuckerberg already has programmers duplicating it, possibly by integrating Skype. I expect this rumoured feature will appear before Facebook loses those users who really want group video-chat.
http://www.tgdaily.com/software-opinion/57017-facebook-teaming-with-skype-for-integrated-video-chat
There are other reasons why I don’t expect millions of people to leave Facebook for Google+. The first is that Goole+ is hard work for non-nerds to set up, compared with Facebook or Twitter. For example, it’s nice to have your friends divided into different Circles for friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues, celebrities etc — you can follow people, the same as on Twitter — but do you really want to do the work? If so, you can do it on Facebook too, using Circlehack.com.
The second reason is that almost all your friends are on Facebook, not on Google+. For example, I could upload my weekend wedding pics to Google+ because it does provide better photo-sharing, but nobody would see them. The audience is on Facebook. That’s not going to change soon.
If you are a nerd or a social media guru, head for http://plus.google.com and try to sign up when Google releases its next small batch of invitations. You’ll love it. However, if you’re a typical Facebook user, it isn’t worth the effort at the moment. Give it year and see whether Google+ really is a real Facebook/Twitter/Flickr killer or just another Wave or Buzz.
