Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Now You Might Consider a Google+ Account

Last week I had written about Facebook invading your Facebook page with advertisements and suggested pages. This week I’m going to write about a similar topic, Google+ trying to acquire more users to personalize Google’s ad targeting.

Until now you didn’t really need to have a Google+ account and even if you had one you barely used it. However YouTube’s new commenting system requires a Google+ account. For Google+ there are a lot of substitutes such as Facebook and Twitter, but for YouTube, you really don’t have a substitute.
Before such action, Google used to have your search data, email history, chat history but from now they will have much more detailed data such as your age, education, work experience, interest and etc.

For users, this change will create a safe haven for some of the sexism, racism comments on YouTube. It will also give YouTube signals for ranking and sorting conversations in comments. For Google, Google+ can capture a younger audience who spends the whole day on YouTube and get rid of the reputation of being old and boring. Google+ can also attract more celebrities from YouTube.


After reading this article I realized how important social media is for collecting personal data and improving the ad targets. However, I wonder how many people will be actually active on Google+ and use it as their social network platform among all the others they already have. And if Google+ actually does succeed in gaining popularity and acquire a lot of customers, I believe it will be a matter of time for the Google+ ads to become as annoying as Facebook ads. 

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