Google+ As A Social Network Now :/

[darko100 1]

The project which started great and i was using it is now dead. According to ComScore, the avg. user of Google + spents 3.3 minutes on the social network. :(Wall Street Journal says that , unlike Facebook users spend over 7 hours, users of Google + spend an average of three minutes from September to January.In contrast to these infos, Larry Page, CEO of Google says that Google became strong competition on Facebook, with 90 million new users since the June launch. But their statistics are only the numbers of new registrations, do not reflect the true user interest because Google requires registration of their social network when you make an account on Google.Anyway Google owns many key services like YouTube and Gmail, every new user of Google + may simply need to use only those services and have no interest in their social network. We can actually see that on youtube there are many google+ features and a direct link to G+.

[sheepdog 10]

Seriously???? People spend 7 hours on Facebook? Is that in one day??? When do they find time to eat, sleep, visit real humans, work, play and in general have a life?

[darko100 1]

Average in USA is 7 hours And it's not a day , it's per month - without stop.

Edited March 12, 2012 by darko100 (see edit history)

[Okara KAmi 0]

I think Facebook's monopoly over the Social Networking game is too absolute for Google+ to stand a chance. Google made some important tactical errors when it came to its product, the first of which, I believe, is the UI. It should have known that, by definition, Facebook is practically the standard for all social networks, and thus, when creating your own site, it should adhere to some important paradigms Facebook set forth. But Google+, while similar to FB in many ways, differs starkly with its use of colors and how large everything is.It's hard to deny that most Google+ users would be FB users too, and thus, it would have been beneficial to stay sensitive to this fact and make the transition between Google+ and Facebook as simple as possible. One way to go about this, something that Android phones already do, is integrating with Facebook. If I have 600 friends on FB, why would I want to start a whole new network on Google+? It should have inflated accounts out of people on Google's contact list AND friends on Facebook, so that when an FB user comes to Google, they don't lose 95% of their friends.Beyond that, the App market for Google+ is practically nonexistant, whereas people are coming out with new FB Apps every day. Making an FB compatible sandbox so that FB Apps can be translated to Google+ apps without too much of a problem, would have also been an important step.It all comes down to transition.Google+ asked too much of its users. We don't want to ditch FB and go to a whole new playground, when there's nothing wrong with our old one.

[multfilm 0]

Seriously???? People spend 7 hours on Facebook? Is that in one day??? When do they find time to eat, sleep, visit real humans, work, play and in general have a life?

Yep, it's true. And that's the *average* user, I think he said. In other words, there's tons and tons of people, even that I know, that sit on facebook from morning to night.

On the other hand, Google does seem to be pretty bad at social networking. First they had something I didn't even try, then the Google You, now the Google Plus. Wonder what's next? But I think people just don't wanna spent 7 *more* hours giving Google their information, they already do so via google search engine, and google docs, google drive, &c.

[demonboy1990 0]

i had google social network once i canceled that because it was rubbish. i only use google for domain mapping for email. i have facebook for a social network why would i want to be on google, facebook has games but google does not.

[darko100 1]

Google+ ofcourse has games and they have more quality than Facebook. Check out Angry Birds on G+. I am the best out there , all levels with the best scores possible.

[velma 6]

Average in USA is 7 hours And it's not a day , it's per month - without stop.

I know a lot of young people who spend more than 8 hours every day on Facebook, actual 8 hours of their day spent on trolling other people, messaging, friending, "poking" , tagging and what not. I find it disturbing... Very disturbing.

 

-- Offtopic --

The core concept behind a social network is for one person to reach out to another, find people and reconnect. In the case of people staying far away, it is understandable that Facebook is the only medium but to use facebook to communicate with those nearby is ridiculous. A person ends up getting more isolated and dependent(?)

 

-- On topic --

 

Google is trying its hardest to monopolize the internet and "conquering" the social networking department is a great sector for enormous data harvesting. The amount of data they'd through a social network would be superior than what their search could ever give, I mean think about it.. People easily reveal their personal information, pictures, location and friends on facebook creating this huge database effortlessly.

 

I have to agree with Okara, the scenario is similar to the current Iphone maps vs Google Maps situation where Facebook already has its niche on the internet and you cannot deny it, the quality is good and anyone with a phone/computer can use it. Besides, who would want to migrate hundreds/ years of data from one social network onto another.. People are either too lazy or don't have the time to do the migration so most of them won't bother with it.

 

However, having said that.. We all know how fickle the internet user is, if facebook turns into the next Orkut or Myspace Google could TRY to win over the masses but it is not going to happen if they don't bring in something unique to the website. No one is going to boycott Facebook for a Facebook clone..

 

Google + in my opinion has potential, it might take the team at Google to innovate something but knowing them, it just might happen sooner than we'd all think.

[Iniyila 2]

Google is a good competitor for facebook, but it is really strange to hear that people only spend 3 minutes for google+ every day. by the way google can bring up its service to become number one very easily, google has many services and the most powerful one is google search engine, now google indexes other peoples written things in their profiles in your searches and this is very good. but google needs to implement some more interesting features in google+, look at facebook it has many features which i like a lot but google + lacks many of these and of course if google wants to get in the game it needs new ideas and should bring some new features which people really need. currently i think facebook is just a lot better, the chatting system, the way you can communicate with your friends and their unique features is just making me to get interested to facebook a lot more than google + .Now the question is why i think that google can easily beat facebook, look at google services like Gmail (which i think now every single person who has a facebook acc has a gmail account too!) , google just makes their service better and better, i really like the new gmail skin and new lab features they have added to it but google doesn't get any money from you for their service and there is only some text ads which are not very annoying. facebook is good at this too but the speed of improvements in their services is just a lot slower and their ads are not only text and there are always image ads like yahoo which are really annoying for me.Another thing is google security , i think google is the best one in this aspect, some day i went to a public place and i tried to enter my facebook account and then i decided to change my pass because it was a long time that i was using my old pass, in the night when i get home i discovered my facebook account is locked and i can't access and it was requesting me to send ID card scan for getting it unlocked, this process took me around one month to get my account back but why i have to do all of those hard process to get my account back ? only because i changed my password from somewhere out of my house ? i don't think you can call it more secure, i call it more annoying, they can easily harden the process of changing your default email and by doing this there is no need for worrying about someone's account to be stolen.And we should never forget Facebook created before google+ and if i want to be honest we should call it the creator of social networks as i know them today, ans i think it is fare for FB to be number 1 in its category because they don't have the money google have and they had lots of new ideas in social networks. by the way we all know google's policy, they will start something and if they didn't like it or the project failed they will close it down easily (remember googlewave !) and i don't like this policy, so for now i will still use my FB and i'm happy with it, maybe someday if google made their google+ more interesting i switch to them.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

Google is a good competitor for facebook, but it is really strange to hear that people only spend 3 minutes for google+ every day. by the way google can bring up its service to become number one very easily, google has many services and the most powerful one is google search engine...

 

Two things here:

 

1) The post about the average user only spending a few minutes a day was many months ago. Google+ has changed a lot since then, so this data has more than likely also changed.

 

2) While Google can change rankings in their search engine, Facebook is well-known by those who are computer literate and those who aren't so much. Along with this, people are so dependent upon FB that they aren't searching for another one, so the rankings in Google are irrelevant. Most people that use FB use it because of word-of-mouth.