In the neophilic world of technology, the newness of Google+ is
fading and, with it, the search giant’s latest effort to compete with
Facebook.
Google might now have opened Plus to all users and added several new features, but the moves come as its momentum had faded since its launch.
After a quick rise, we now have some evidence that Google+ is suffering from an equally quick fall. The real names controversy continues to thunder on, but even more than that, usage began to fall less than a month after it launched. A report this week claimed that posts have declined by 41% from July to August, although this only measured public posts which doesn’t capture the full use of the site.
Now we’re seeing a pretty constant drumbeat of early, some might say premature, predictions of the death of Plus. Calling it a “ghost town”, journalism professor Dan
Reimold wrote on MediaShift:
If Google wants to prove critics wrong, it needs to move quickly to bring Google+ up to speed with the rapid development of Facebook or find itself with yet another failed social project. After using it now for a few months, I have trouble remembering to go back to use it even with the notifications appearing at the top of the Google tool bar or in my Gmail inbox. Most of the notifications aren’t actually letting me know about new comments or conversations but rather telling me that yet more people who I don’t know have added me to their network. Worse, most of those notifications are impossibly attractive women who are probably spambots.
I use applications like Tweetdeck on my computer to manage my accounts on Twitter and Facebook. Google Buzz is there but not Google+. Google+ doesn’t work on my three-year-old smartphone. Facebook and Twitter notifications come to me as SMS, which I find much more convenient than remembering to go to Google+ everyday. I expect social networks to fit into my life, not change the way I live online.
The people who are still on Google+ it are often professional users of social networks: technologists, journalists, social media consultants.
I was surprised that Google launched without the kind of API that would allow it to compete with the Twitter eco-system or the Facebook platform. But they are now rolling out the first APIs and, while a couple of months after launch doesn’t seem like a long time to wait, Google+ didn’t create a new market. It entered a crowded, hyper-competitive one, and it remains to be seen if anyone actually does anything interesting with the new API.
One of the main goals of Google+ was to bring the power of social recommendation to Google’s signature search product. I see that happening in its main web search, where I now see friends who have recommended search results, but I’m not seeing the power of social recommendation in Google+ itself.
Sparks is supposed to be a service that delivers content based on your interests and the intelligence of your social network. Right now, there are several other services that do this infinitely better than Sparks, including iPad apps such as Zite. Even Google+’s internal recommendation system, the +1, is useless as anything more than a transient vote of approval, as there is no way to browse either your own or your friends’ +1s.
It’s only a month and a half since Google+ launched, but Google is running out of opportunities to get a social service right. Plus launched with features that showed that the company had clearly learned from some of their past mistakes and from the market. But they haven’t learnt enough and, at the moment, it doesn’t look nearly good enough to pose a serious challenge to Facebook.
Google might now have opened Plus to all users and added several new features, but the moves come as its momentum had faded since its launch.
After a quick rise, we now have some evidence that Google+ is suffering from an equally quick fall. The real names controversy continues to thunder on, but even more than that, usage began to fall less than a month after it launched. A report this week claimed that posts have declined by 41% from July to August, although this only measured public posts which doesn’t capture the full use of the site.
Now we’re seeing a pretty constant drumbeat of early, some might say premature, predictions of the death of Plus. Calling it a “ghost town”, journalism professor Dan
Screen grab from ibnlive.com
“I am writing to second Tassi’s declaration: Google+ is dead. At worst, in the coming months, it will literally fade away to nothing or exist as Internet plankton. At best, it will be to social networking what Microsoft’s Bing is to online search: perfectly adequate; fun to stumble onto once in awhile; and completely irrelevant to the mainstream web.”He was seconding the Google+ eulogy of Paul Tassi, who wrote this on Forbes.com:
“It’s a vast and empty wasteland, full of people who signed up but never actually stuck around to figure out how things worked in this new part of town. One simple click takes me back to Facebook, and my wall is flooded with updates and pictures from 400+ friends. This just isn’t a contest, and it never will be.”Keeping pace with Facebook
If Google wants to prove critics wrong, it needs to move quickly to bring Google+ up to speed with the rapid development of Facebook or find itself with yet another failed social project. After using it now for a few months, I have trouble remembering to go back to use it even with the notifications appearing at the top of the Google tool bar or in my Gmail inbox. Most of the notifications aren’t actually letting me know about new comments or conversations but rather telling me that yet more people who I don’t know have added me to their network. Worse, most of those notifications are impossibly attractive women who are probably spambots.
I use applications like Tweetdeck on my computer to manage my accounts on Twitter and Facebook. Google Buzz is there but not Google+. Google+ doesn’t work on my three-year-old smartphone. Facebook and Twitter notifications come to me as SMS, which I find much more convenient than remembering to go to Google+ everyday. I expect social networks to fit into my life, not change the way I live online.
The people who are still on Google+ it are often professional users of social networks: technologists, journalists, social media consultants.
I was surprised that Google launched without the kind of API that would allow it to compete with the Twitter eco-system or the Facebook platform. But they are now rolling out the first APIs and, while a couple of months after launch doesn’t seem like a long time to wait, Google+ didn’t create a new market. It entered a crowded, hyper-competitive one, and it remains to be seen if anyone actually does anything interesting with the new API.
One of the main goals of Google+ was to bring the power of social recommendation to Google’s signature search product. I see that happening in its main web search, where I now see friends who have recommended search results, but I’m not seeing the power of social recommendation in Google+ itself.
Sparks is supposed to be a service that delivers content based on your interests and the intelligence of your social network. Right now, there are several other services that do this infinitely better than Sparks, including iPad apps such as Zite. Even Google+’s internal recommendation system, the +1, is useless as anything more than a transient vote of approval, as there is no way to browse either your own or your friends’ +1s.
It’s only a month and a half since Google+ launched, but Google is running out of opportunities to get a social service right. Plus launched with features that showed that the company had clearly learned from some of their past mistakes and from the market. But they haven’t learnt enough and, at the moment, it doesn’t look nearly good enough to pose a serious challenge to Facebook.
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