Yesterday, Google released its own social network to the world named Google Plus (+). A big hype was created among all social media networks (specially Twitter), everyone was talking about it and almost forgot the grand premiere of the third installment of Transformers.
Google released their social network as a direct competitor to Facebook and was marketing their product by telling its users that they have the chance of sharing their status updates, pictures, videos etc., with only the people they choose. This was created through a concept named ‘circles’, which are quite similar to the groups in FB. Also, people were able to join only through invites; so, a lot of hype was created among all social network enthusiasts.I got a first hand look at Google + today and my initial thought was it was not that bad. The circle concept seems okay and how it handles all the pictures, status updates and videos seems ok for me. The problem I had was getting and sending invites. Other stuff looked okay.Google + is still in its early days and though Google says that they can challenge the niche achieved by Facebook in the world of Social Media: I don’t think it will happen soon. As pointed out correctly by one of my friends, Facebook is the pioneer in changing the way we think of Social Networking and its number of users is almost up to one billion. Google will face a tough task of attracting new users to their product (though people who use Gmail will be an easy access point) and gaining the market share of Facebook, its simplicity and popularity won’t be that easy to match.Also, another thing that I noticed was that Google + doesn’t seem to cater to business users and brands. If they want to be the leader they will need to do it since Facebook and Twitter are used heavily by business users worldwide to market their brands and has become successful in doing it.The product is still in the testing stage so, we should not expect everything to happen overnight. One thing I feel is that Google needs to be patient in their mission to be the best with Google +.They created a super service like Gmail which I still think is the best mail service in the world right now. So adding more features and providing support to businesses and brands will help it to grow and gain advantage from Facebook . They should also get rid of this ridiculous feature of allowing people to use the service through invites, they did it for Gmail but now you can see what has happened right?more
The next few weeks will be exciting to all social media enthusiasts as everyone waits to see the fate of Google+. Personally, I hope it won’t be a disaster like Orkut and Google Wave, but to determine that; we just have to wait and watch.
By BuildingMyBrand (chamindrah.wordpress.com) (The Sunday Leader)
