Google+ Still Trying to Catch On

For the last eight months Google has been striving to expand the usage of Google+: their social network response to Facebook. I've had a Facebook account for several years now and tonight I opened a Google+ account to see what it's all about.

Relative Advantage:

"Me-too" Features: at first glance many aspects of Google+ are profoundly similar, both in appearance and function, to features that currently exist in Facebook. A few of the Google features and their Facebook counterparts are as follows:

• Stream = News Feed
• +1 = Like
• Share = Status Update
• Profile is the same thing on both sites (disregarding the timeline feature on Facebook)

Moderate Advantage Features: there are a handful of aspects of Google+ that give it an edge over Facebook:

• Creative Kit: a tool that allows users to modify pictures by cropping, adjusting color, adding touch-ups, and even making themselves tanner. Facebook limits users to cropping photos.
• Circles: a system of grouping friends by categories such as family, friends, teammates and then sharing and viewing content based on these categories. Facebook has a similar feature with "friends lists" but it is not set up to play as integral or useful of a role.
• Hangouts: group video chats with friends as opposed to the strictly individual ones enabled by Facebook.
• Connection to other Google services such as search

Pros:

• Compatibility: Google has immense potential to become a complete online application experience if they can overtake the social networking market. The possibilities that stem from linking the social network with their existing services such as GMail and Search present the potential to create a remarkably comprehensive one-stop source of online applications. Facebook does not currently provide the variety of services necessary to provide a comparable experience.
• Complexity: Google has certainly produced a very simple product for the end-user. The combination of their concise introductory walk through and my previous experience with Facebook made it very easy for me to begin using the site in a matter of minutes.

Cons

• Trialability: Although it is very simple to set up a Google+ account and try it, the current lack of users makes it impossible to try it in the capacity that you would truly use a comprehensive social network. I found only nine friends on Google+ compared to the few hundred I have on Facebook, which greatly limits the extent to which I will find it useful. More importantly, most Facebook users have accumulated a an immense amount of content on Facebook, namely pictures. As a result, when people want to look at pictures from their lives they often go on Facebook rather than go through folders on their computers because Facebook is where all of their pictures and all of their friend's pictures are. Convincing users to abandon this library of content or somehow move it over to Google+ is the single biggest hurdle Google+ faces.
• Observability: Short of signing yourself up, the observability of Google+ is limited to advertising and viewing friends' profiles. And a quick glance at a Google+ profile does not make it stand out as anything special. Both social networks are very similar in aesthetic quality and the layout of the basic features i.e. profile & stream/news feed. Advertising will have to sell features like hangouts hard to make up for this.

The social networking market isn't big enough for both of them. I don't think anyone will ever bother to actively manage more than one social networking account. I know I certainly won't. More likely, users will open Google+ accounts (like I just did) and then forget about them and go back to Facebook (like I'm probably about to do).

Had both of these products been introduced at the same time I think Google+ would have used its brand recognition and handful of unique features to race ahead and never look back. But they weren't created at the same time, and I don't think Google + is different enough from Facebook to convince users to abandon Facebook and switch. The small degree of product change that Google+ offers will be outweighed by the large amount of behavioral change involved in starting over from scratch on a new social network.

Then again, if any company was ever going to find a way to dethrone Facebook, it would probably be Google.

What do you think? Will Google+ ever catch on and make it as a long-haul success or will they always remain in the backseat to Facebook?

Sources: NYTimes Bits Blog, All Things Digital, Google+