For the past few weeks and even months, each time I use google to make online searches, I’ve been really curious as to what the “You+” tab meant. After reading over a fellow student’s blog, Stephen Tran, I felt it was time for me to find out. Google+ 
After a very brief internet research, I found out that Google+ was a social-networking platform introduced to compete with other social-networking sites, especially Facebook. Like Facebook, Google+ provides its users to share pictures, thoughts, ideas amongst the users friends. Google’s blog suggests that “In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.” And with that comes Google+. With Google+, comes a few ideas that differentiate this platform from Facebook. For example, Google+ introduced “circles”, a way for users to separate its friends list in smaller groups. “Circles” enables the user to keep some thing private with a certain number of individuals instead of letting every friend in on it.
As a Facebook user myself, the idea of Google+ is very exciting to me, but very much like google’s other attempts at social-networking platforms (ie. Google Wave and Google Buzz), I have doubts surrounding its success. Though it may have introduced many cool concepts, I have little interest in starting an account myself. I remember when I first started to consistently use Facebook, many of my friends were already using it and though I may have been a huge “bandwagoner” for joining Facebook, I simply just did not want to be left out. And for me, the same idea applies for Google+, unless they can garner enough support and popularity, I can not see myself becoming a user.
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I have a Google+ account, and honestly? No one even uses it. It was just a hype thing.
Check this trends page: http://www.google.com/trends?q=google%2B
You’ll notice that there was only a brief spike in searches for Google+ when it was first announced, but since then it has dropped drastically. Now I can’t say for sure whether or not it remains popular, but taking a look at the data above, they show that the regions that search the most for Google+ are on the other side of the world for a phenomenon that would theoretically be more popular on the Western hemisphere.
Facebook has had enough time to meet the needs of its users. Any new social network scheme would have to surpass all of Facebook’s utilities to even remotely stand a chance of surviving.
Thanks for the link! I think it’s pretty evident that if Google+ wants to make a real push into the social media industry, they would have to differentiate themselves successfully from Facebook. Some of their ideas do seem novel but without anyone to share these new ideas with, Google+ almost becomes obsolite