Google+ launched this month with a lot of hurrah and hype, but after the first week of furious inviting, the excitement has died down and it is just another Google offering. I’m not surprised at all.

When people first heard about it, for some reason their expectation was that it will be a Facebook competitor. I don’t think that could be a fair competition because this is truly a David vs Goliath fight; but Facebook will be the benchmark in which G+ will be measured. In that view, Google Plus is destined to fail.

Facebook has the critical mass, and has succeeded because of that. It has attracted not just the bleeding/cutting edge tech folks, but regular moms, pops, and teeny boppers who don’t care much about computer technology. What incentive does G+ have for these groups? Increased privacy once they’ve understood how circles work. Great, but if they truly wanted this, they would have invested time into understanding Facebook friends lists.

Regular users don’t care, but privacy pundits say they should, and that the onus should be on the service (whether it’s FB or G+) to protect their users privacy for them. G+ accomplishes this, but intrinsically makes the service harder to pick up. In the end, the average Joe will look at G+ and see that they have to spend time to understanding the concept of Circles, and once they have they can start partially stalking a couple of their techy friends. That’s not a good story.

So I am not surprised that once the initial hype for G+ had died down, Facebook is still popular and still king. Sure, there are people using G+ now, just as there are people who prefer Twitter or MySpace; but I think it is a long long way from competing against Facebook.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: facebook, google