Why Google+ is the Ultimate Social Networking Hybrid.
Google, Social Networking
In the last ten years of the web, we’ve witnessed the rise of the unstoppable freight train that is Google. Extremely crafty and ingenious in the ways in which they innovate, we’ve seen them knock over the title of world’s largest search engine, pioneer web metrics, and occasionally have a dig at social networking; the latter of which has never been taken too seriously.
As a search engine, Google has always been perceived to be too impersonal and sterile to be able to successfully function as a hub for online social activity. Instead, we’ve seen the figureheads Facebook and Twitter set the standard for engaging social activity online. Google Wave, to its credit, was never intended to be a social networking platform but instead a community-driven tool of productivity. To be fair, the only direct attempt that Google has made at competing with Facebook was Google Buzz. I guess that you could say that it was a trial and error exercise for Google. They saw a hole in the market open up, and they lunged at it, without properly formulating something built entirely for the people, which ultimately, is the core factor in a social network becoming popular.
This is how Facebook achieved greatness. While Facebook did pioneer a lot of things, they did not invent the idea of the social network. The social network has been around since the days of ‘Yahoo! Geocities’. What gave Facebook their success, most notably over networking giants MySpace.com, is that they refined the idea, simplified it, and ultimately made it better.
A good social network is a hybrid of its predecessors, and this is exactly what Google has just achieved with Google+.
What makes Google+ so different.
Again, the key to a successful social network is one that is built purely to meet the demands of the general public. Translated into what needs to be achieved in order to harbour online loyalty, we simply need to look at what Facebook has done, and how Google+ has improved upon it.
Google+ addresses Facebook’s fatal flaws.
Facebook became popular because it virtually rendered Internet anonymity obsolete. All of a sudden, there was a social net work that was not only encouraging, but almost forcing you to be you online. It also introduced the status update, which left you feeling fanatical about checking your ‘newsfeed’ to see which one of your ‘friends’ was in a new relationship, who had chicken for dinner last night, which one of them got so drunk they passed out, etc.
For Facebook there were of course flaws. For example, everyone on your ‘friends’ list appears in your newsfeed, and everything you post appears in theirs. Unless you ‘block’ someone from viewing your profile, as long as you’re friends with them, then they’re always going to see what you’re up to. This element is kind of invasive. For example, if your boss adds you on Facebook (Hi, Trent!), or you’ve got your Great Aunty Flo on there, the next time you post something, let’s say “got way too drunk, ate a bunch of hotdogs and puked on my mate’s lawn”, then they’re going to know about it. Google+ addresses this major flaw in social networking by allowing you to assign the people you ‘follow’ into groups, or ‘circles’, from the get-go. You can have separate newsfeeds for family members, drinking buddies, work colleagues, team mates… You get the idea.
Google+ is born for mobile.
Google+ is a social network that will be born into the age of the smart phone, whereas the likes of Facebook have had to adapt. This is a massive new feature that Google+ boasts over its competitors because the social network is already engineered to fit in with a smart-phone savvy search engine. Unlike Facebook, when you upload photos on Google+ from your mobile, there is no load time. As soon as you take a picture – it’s online, waiting in a private album, ready for you to edit or delete.
It has a cleaner, intuitive user-interface
This means less time spent working out what you would like to do, and more time being able to organise and edit the content that matters most to you. I almost feel like I’m selling the product as I write this, but I actually endorse this feature 100%. Facebook is full of junk you couldn’t give a damn about. Your newsfeed can become littered by posts from fan pages you ‘liked’ and forgot about eons ago. If you make a mistake typing a status update, then you have to manually delete it and retype it. Google+ on the other hand gives you more control over what goes in and out of your primary newsfeed, lets you build up a hearty catalogue of ‘favourited’ links, and even lets you freely edit typing mistakes in posts without you have to delete anything.
In summing up – it’s definitely the simple things that will make Google+ big. Will it overtake Facebook? Well, Facebook certainly has a head start so one can only speculate. I think what it will do, however, is revolutionise the standard for social networking and force Facebook to reevaluate the core features of their network.
The formula that Google has concocted for Google+ is pure genius. We’ve been talking about it all week at Ziller, and we personally can’t wait to see it go live in the next couple of months!
What are your thoughts? Will Google+ throw Facebook off its pedestal?







