Maintaining momentum
For people who believe social networking has become a cornerstone of modern society, the arrival of Google+ almost three months ago was a really big deal. Suddenly Facebook didn't look so imperious, and it was even reduced to allegedly copying the features of Google+ in order to keep up.
Access to Google+ was initially by invitation only, and we were among the lucky few. Initially it was all very exciting - all the cool kids were on Google+, marvelling at the new social segregation tools available to them and congratulating themselves on being part of an elite social networking club, free of the kind of layman riff-raff that clutters Facebook.
But once the novelty died down, most of the cool kids stopped posting on Google+, leaving just a few zealots. The biggest issue was that people couldn't be bothered to either duplicate what they were already posting on Facebook or think of unique stuff to dribble. Third party tools might have helped, but TweetDeck, for example, is still offering Buzz rather than Google+.
So we stopped visiting, and have only done so this morning in order to refresh our knowledge while writing this story. Right now it's hard not to feel pretty indifferent about Google+ - we're happy it exists, but have no personal use for it right now. We still have 150 unused invitations, and thus were underwhelmed by the announcement that Google+ is now available to everyone.
In a blog post, Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra pointed out that there have been a bunch more recent improvements, especially to the Hangouts group video chat facility. You can now ‘hangout' on your phone and even broadcast one - as you will see if you visit will.i.am's Google+ page later today.
That's all great, and we're not questioning how innovative Google is being with Google+, but the challenge it has is in making its social networking platform as much of a default setting for people who want to share things as Facebook and Twitter already are. It helps that Google is still the world's most visited website, and as you can see from the screenshot below, Google is not holding back in exploiting this resource.
As Gundotra said in his blog post, "Google+ is still in its infancy". It took a long time for Facebook and Twitter to achieve critical mass, and there's little reason to believe things will happen any quicker for Google+, no matter how much money and technology there is behind it. Rome wasn't built in a day, but we suspect that if Google loses momentum at this early stage, it will be hard to recover.
