Social networks are the hot thing and dozens of them have appeared online, each attempting to take some of the market share that has already been claimed by Facebook, Twitter, Linked in and, mostly formerly, MySpace.
This has lead to a significant debate over whether Google+ will ever have the type of influence that those other established social networks have held, or if it will simply become one of a tremendous number of copycats and failures that were forgotten before they were known.
If it does have a chance of hanging in, it is because of three major features:
• Privacy – many people are starting to trickle away from using Facebook because of its lack of transparency and flexibility of privacy controls regardless of repeated attempts. Moreover, Facebook has yet to achieve that goal and is still widely criticized. Google+ is in a solid place to outperform them.
• Integration – As a stand-alone service, this is a limitation that Facebook has experienced from its inception. Google+ has been created to interact securely with the other Google products.
• Simplicity – the challenge to navigate Facebook is a continual frustration to many of its users. This is one strength that Google consistently displays: an ability to keep even the most complex systems quite simple so that a user won’t become swamped by the options. They already demonstrated this ability when Gmail appeared to be headed to a format that was too cluttered. Google saw it before it became a problem and gave it a new look.
