Future of Google+

I read the Forbes and business insider articles:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2015/02/26/exclusive-sundar-pichais-plan-to-keep-google-almighty/2/

 http://www.businessinsider.com/google-breaking-up-google-2015-2?utm_term=10+Things+In+Tech+You+Need+To+Know&nr_email_referer=1&utm_content=bufferfae08&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

This seems to be a major announcement from Sundar Pichai, Senior Vice President of Android, Chrome and Apps, mentioning Google+ could be broken down into different components.  Primarily, he meant that Google Photos and Hangouts would be separated from Google+.  At the same time, he also assured that none of the Google products are disappearing or closing down. This is especially interesting since from a social media perspective, Google+ could not make any significant impact as Facebook made. In fact, currently Google+ is not even in the top 5 in the list of leading social networks based on the number of active users. While Facebook currently leads with about 1.366 billion active users, Google+ is far behind at number 7 with 343 million active users. Please refer to the following link:

http://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/

To understand the future of Google+, it is necessary to briefly discuss the history. I think most would have already forgotten Orkut by now. Orkut was a social networking website owned and operated by Google. The service was designed to help users meet new and old friends and maintain existing relationships, a social media platform. It started in 2004 and soon had many users world-wide especially in Brazil and India until 2008. Facebook also launched later in 2004 and ensured it was the most popular in the US and most of the Europe. Soon, Orkut could not match the advanced features and the tremendous growth of Facebook. At the end of April 2010, Orkut had 19.7 million unique visitors compared to Facebook, with 18 million visitors worldwide. Facebook grabbed the number one position for the first time in July 2010 with 20.9 million visitors, up 179%, a year ago. Since then, Orkut could never catch-up and had to be closed for ever last year in September 2014.

In addition to Facebook’s growth and its ease of use especially with mobile devices, I think another major reason for Orkut’s demise was Google was focusing on Google+ instead of enhancing and saving Orkut. Google+ was born in 2011. Google+ seemed to integrate in a better way as compared to Orkut on mobile devices but still has not caught up with Facebook yet. I think the key advantage is that Google+ provides a way to ensure users signed in to different Google services could have a common identity across all products. For example, if one is logged into his or her Google+ account in Chrome browser, he or she will be automatically logged into Gmail, Google Drive, and the Google's other services. This integrated user experience is critical for Google to ensure it has the accurate customer behavior. This is perhaps one of the reasons why Google+ is still very useful for Google even though it is not having a deep market penetration with active users as compared to the leaders such as Facebook. With that in mind, I think Google+ would soon be re-branded as an integrated platform for Google as compared to a Social Media network.

Reference:

http://knowtechie.com/google-plus-227/

http://marketingland.com/google-breakup-coming-photos-hangouts-119730

 

OpenSocial: Getting Social Networks To Talk

Tomorrow Google will be announcing a new social networking initiative called OpenSocial, which will provide a common, free platform for social networking sites to open up their data to third-party application developers. Social Networks which adopt the standard will be able to share information about user profiles, friends, and activities with other sites in a standardized way, which should greatly facilitate the transfer of information about the social graph between services. In addition to their own Orkut site, Google has partnered with Ning, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, and others, all of which will be supporting OpenSocial.



The rapid uptake of the Facebook Platform since its May launch has left little doubt about the value of allowing third parties to build functionality on top of existing social networks. Their are currently over 7,000 Facebook apps deployed, and these apps are getting about 32 million hits per day. This frenzied activity has been one of the primary drivers of the company's stratospheric $15 billion valuation. Yet, all of this value creation remains locked within Facebook's "walled garden". OpenSocial is a significant step towards breaking down the walls between the currently-siloed social networks, and so threatens to take considerable wind out of Facebook's sails.



Marc Andreessen, founder of Ning (not to mention Netscape), has an excellent overview of the new standard. TechCrunch has their own overview, as well as a preview gallery of applications built using OpenSocial.