Google+ has been launched a few weeks ago and the numbers of its staggering growth are released weekly, pointing to a much faster growth than facebook or twitter.
The comparison is intriguing but mostly meaningless. Google+ is a service released by the most powerful internet company in the world with a user base of close to a 1bn, including hundreds of millions of gmail accounts. At the time of their launch, facebook and twitter were unknown start-ups among hundreds vying for internet users' time. They were targeting only US users or even a subset (top US universities for Facebook). On the contrary, Google has deployed a massive PR and marketing effort to convince its user base to try its service. So far, it has managed to convince 1% or 2% of its users to try Google+. Quite good but not earth shattering.
The real question for Google+ is whether it will be able to cross the chasm or not. Early adopters and geeks tend to love most products launched by Google. At its launch, Google Wave had good reviews from the tech enthusiast. The issue came when real people started trying the service and didn't see the point. As far as Google+ is concerned, I don't think that is the risk. It is a very nice service with a clean and efficient user interface. This time, I don't think there is a real risk of average users not enjoying Google+.
However, for a social network, being good is not enough. It needs to be significantly better than existing solutions (i.e. Facebook) to justify users switching. The staggering figures for Facebook is not so much the number of users (it is still very impressive) but even more the time spent per user. The stickiness is such that in many countries, Facebook is the number one website in term of time spent. The stake for Google is to have people try Google+ but beyond that, have them switch a major part of their digital life (friends, games, photos …). So what we are seeing is just the beginning of the battle between Facebook and Google who are know the major competitors in internet: they are fighting for same advertising dollars and eyeballs time.
Google+ is very good social networks and is a real alternative to Facebook but the fight for time (and not only users) is only starting.
Frederic HALLEY
An internal source at Google confirmed to me that users were signing in drove but time spent and postings were still quite low.
Posted by: Tiogaventure | Wednesday, 27 July 2011 at 09:55