Preparing for a Post-Google+ World
Unless you have somehow avoided the ceaseless chatter in the past several weeks, let’s catch you up quickly on the current state of Google+. Like a zombie on The Walking Dead, Google’s attempt at a vibrant social network is still moving forward, unveiling new features, but talk to anyone within the social media community and the answer to any question about the future of Google+ is likely to come out along these lines: stick a fork in it, it’s done.
While the site had its fair share of skeptics when it was first unveiled four years ago, certain novel features—such as “circles” that allowed you to segment your online companions and “Google hangouts” that enabled one to hold a board meeting without buying any proprietary software—helped the network to grow rapidly, before its initial surge flatlined, with a recent report revealing that less than 1% of the 2.2 billion Google users being active on the network.
And yet, despite the past two months of seemingly assured death, Google+ continues on and is even announcing new features. Let’s take a pulse on the current state of Google+.
- Active Google+ users are a rare breed
One feature that’s helped Google+ grow its user base quickly is the fact that whenever someone signs up for Google, a Google+ account is created. However, while Google users largely take advantage of such features as Gmail and Gchat, Google+ is much of a draw for Google users, with a recent study finding that 90% of people with a Google+ profile have never even posted on the network. Thus, while Google can claim to have 2.2 million users, it’s likely that they lag far behind Facebook and its 1.44 billion monthly active users.
- It never really had an identity of its own
While Facebook and Twitter both introduced truly novel social platforms, Google+ always seemed like a hodgepodge of the existing social networks and it arrived in a climate in which Twitter and Facebook already reigned supreme. Thus, such features as Circles and Sparks only ever came off as slight improvements on Facebook and Twitter’s hallmark features, hardly enough to cultivate a dedicated user base.
- Despite these facts, Google+ will likely continue on
Unlike previous Google failures such as Orkut, Wave.Buzz, and Google Health, Google seems to truly believe that it will fall behind competitively if it fails to successfully compete in the social sphere. After all, with 2.2 billion people using Google products, the company has a far larger user base to leverage than any of its competitors. Thus, the network continues its onward march of borrowing ideas from other social networks, the most recent being its Collections feature, which seeks to emulate Pinterest’s scrapbooking tool.
Despite the dire prognosis, it stands to reason that Google will either likely stick with Google+ due to its financial ability to, or start harvesting the network’s different features and integrating those into Google’s other products. Either way, for those declaring the death of Google+ just a month ago, it seems like that prognosis is far more nuanced that it originally appeared.
