Google+ the new Facebook or Google+ just Google+

By Steve White posted 11-08-2011 11:39

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Google+ just another Facebook?

I have been on Google+ since the "invite" happened right before the public offering. Google+ seems to be an offshoot of Facebook and MySpace of social media but I feel it takes a different spin that seems to be more dynamic than what Facebook offers.

Google+ has approx 50 million users or probably more by this post and Facebook has over 800 million users and growing. It appears to be a battle of who will dominate the social networking world. In 2006, Facebook brought in it's site to the public outside of high school and college offerings September 2006 with the rate of less than 20 million users starting and then it skyrocketed by 2009 to almost 350 million bringing the social network to a boom and bypassing it's predecessor, MySpace to an almost halt.

clipped from wikipedia.com

There is an impressive twist to these figures. Google+ took 2 months to match 5 years of growth of Facebook and combined it with a shocking 50 million subscribers. Now the details are a little bit skewed given that Facebook brought social networking to the front end of technology. Still, very impressive to bring Google+ into the mix with other social networking tools like Microsoft Live, Yahoo and even Google a.k.a. Google buzz and Google Wave tried to compete but lost traction. Google+ has now made a line in the sand and beginning to compete with LinkedIn and others on the heels of Facebook as a direct competitor. Impressed with the 50 million, this does go with many folks that are on Google+, Will.i.am, The Muppets, Coldplay, and even Sammy Hagar. Google Hangouts like Dalai Lama & Desmond Tutu hang out on Google+ and Black Eye Peas concert.

Now combining Google Apps for Business with Google+ and connecting itself to Google Reader, it is bringing Knowledge Management to the forefront. Also with Video, a.k.a. Hangouts and extended business tools for video conferencing, it blows Facebook out of the water and making this new feature of Google to go to an untouched market. Today, the offering of "Pages" to the Google+ network is an added bonus to put businesses and websites and products to your circles is a great way of extending "knowledge" to your circles keeping everyone updated.

LinkedIn has approx 100 million subscribers so Google+ is right at it's heels. I think that by second qtr 2012, Google+ will surpass LinkedIn in subscriber base. I believe that the areas that Google+ needs to handle over the next year is shutting down the confusion of it's corporate Google Apps user base with it's consumer Gmail public base. I also would like to see a clearly defined Google Security element that will attract business users to Google+ by providing some education on security of it's Google Apps for business offerings. Authentication protocols like OpenID and SSO to Google+ would be an added bonus to give education in that area. The security of our right in Google+ would then separate the competition.

With tight collaboration efforts to Google Apps subscribers and Google+ users on the consumer side bringing traction to the social networking segment, I see that Google will bridge the gap of social networking in a sense for business users to a level that will go unmatched.

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