September 23, 2011 External Sites Will Determine Google+ Success

If you are in the social networking arena at all you know that Google's social network, Google+, went live to the public a few days ago. Since then membership has skyrocketed to the millions almost overnight. In a strange and coincidental turn of events, Facebook drastically changed their site once again annoying its user base. I believe the Google+ membership explosion is a direct result due to Facebook alienating its users once again. Mark Zuckerberg is slowly becoming a very unpopular guy. I could write pages and pages about how disconnected Zuckerberg is to true social networking and how that disconnection ties into his personality but I am not going to. Instead I want to talk about how Google+ can topple Facebook.

In the shortest and best explanation I can muster, people use social networking to socialize and consume tidbits of information about their contacts. Facebook always took a stance that once a friend always a friend and all your "friends" should know everything about you no matte what type of "friend" someone is. This always bugged me about Facebook and why I never friended co-workers, family members, or acquaintances, that's because I say and do things around my closest of friends I never would do to a co-worker. Facebook never allowed you to easily differentiate between the two. That is until recently when Google+ comes along with their Circles. Google's Circles are designed to specifically allow you to differentiate between your types of contacts. Facebook has since come out with Lists that do the same thing. Google listened, Facebook did not.

Google+ and Google itself is about dissemination of information. I don't think Google cares much about flair, buttons, walls, games, and junk like that. All they want is a place where you can send information to your contacts, whether it's status information, photo information, link information, whatever. No flair just information. I think this is what the main stream users of social networks, especially business users, want and need. Facebook has bloated itself with so much junk to get to what you want it's no longer simple and quick to use. But Facebook is about the almighty advertising dollar and the longer you spend on Facebook the higher chance you will actually click on an ad. Google relies on the Google network to get it's ad revenue, it doesn't need to make Google+ about fancy cosmetic layouts and fancy features.

To my point of this post is Google+ dominance. That will rely on the adoption of external sites to post and use information in the Google+ network. I look at how I use the social site, I have this blog as well as others on Posterous, Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, and a few random others. I use a few automated posting sites to update them all. Google+ is new that most of the sites haven't plugged it into their list of posting options yet. When they do I will be adding it to my list of locations. Google needs to go out to the major makers out there and embrace them to encourage automatic posting and automatic retrievals of updates to Google+. It will get there, but it needs to happen soon. I try to update Google+ as much as I can but it's not part of my routine yet and it would be much easier to just add it and not worry about it. It would be fantastic to be able to read the updates through FlipBoard on my iPad when I check the updates from everywhere else. I think until that happens there will be a significant drop off of usage of Google+ after the flood of registrations. Right now everyone is doing it, but when it becomes cumbersome to update and read the information people will revert back to Facebook.

End of Line
@binaryblogger

Posted in: Facebook,Google,Instagram,Technology