Is it over for Google+ already?

About a month ago it seemed as though Google+ was the exclusive, cutting edge social network to be part of, and I wrote about its popularity for Metrica’s Measurement Matters, and all of its great new capabilities. However, the Google+ dynamo seems to have ground to a halt in the space of a few short weeks, and many have declared the new social network to be already dead in the water.

In ‘A Eulogy for Google Plus‘ Paul Tassi expresses his disenchantment and boredom with the social network;

“I click on my newsfeed and see tumbleweed blowing through the barren search engines.”

Tassi argues that the failure of Google+ to take off is down to the fact that it does not offer users anything radically different to Facebook, so there is no incentive for people to invest time and energy into the network; “It’s the same party with different decorations but only 3% of the guests”.

Not Dead Yet

‘A Eulogy for Google Plus’ drove many fans to rally to the social network’s defence. Peter Bernstein argues that any straight comparison between Facebook and Google+ is too simplistic. Rather, the ultimate goal of Google+ is to create and internet “ecosystem” which will transform the way that we use the web, becoming the “digital dashboard that can mediate all of my multiple virtual personae according to my policies and rules”.

It seems that Google+ has all of the potential to shape the widely theorised future of the internet, but this will go to waste if the social network can’t tempt people to join up and start using it to begin with. Many have found the process of inviting and adding others on Google+ to be laborious – people don’t know the email addresses of most of their friends, and are reluctant to go to the trouble of finding them out (this, in any case would be done by looking on Facebook). The bottom line is that we content-creators are a narcissistic bunch – we want people to see what we’ve written. As Tassi puts it;

“Why post a status update or album to Plus where ten people will see it, when you can do so on Facebook where it will catch the eyes of 500 friends instead?”

© image birgerking

Related posts

• The Friday PR and Social Media Cheat Sheet #014
• Tim’s week in social media
• How to Be Present in Social Media
• Who Do We Trust? Celebrities vs. ‘People Like Us’
• The Friday PR and Social Media Cheat Sheet #025