Will Google+ be a "Ghost City"

  Pi Ke        2012-02-28 09:44:39       4,892        4    
Just now, I read an article about Google+’s status quo. The key point of this article is that it states that Google+ is now a “Ghost City”. According to the article, users of Google+ spend only 3 minutes per month on Google+, this is a very low participation rate for a social network website.

After reading this, I wonder whether Google+ is really a Ghost City now, I cannot give my answer. Since it was released just around 8 months ago, so the user base is not very large. I registered a Google+ a few months ago. And I found some features of Google+ are really cool, such as Hangouts and YouTube search, although I never used them. I spend much time at the beginning to explore the features provided by Google+. After some time, I found that there was no major difference between Google+ and Facebook. They both provide similar functionalities such as status update, post share and friends find. So I started to think why I have to use Google+ since I already have a Facebook account. Now I spend less and less time on Google+.

What will be Google+’s final destination? I think in the future Google+ will be a Ghost City if there are no many attractive features provided by Google+.

Currently there are many SNS (Social Network Service) providers, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+. They all let us publish status, upload images and share other’s news feed. Then why do we need register all these accounts? We only need one or two. They are more than enough as long as we can find our friends there.  We don’t have so much time to update a status on all these websites again and again.

According to Google CEO Larry Page, there are more than 60 million users registered on Google+ since June 2011. This is a huge amount of users. But the problem is that how much time a user spends on Google+, if no one uses Google+, then it is meaningless to say how many registered users you have. I have to say that Google+ is a very cool application. But we need to admit it’s too late. If it is released before Facebook came out. The situation may be reverted now.

I guess this is also related to social fatigue. After spending so much time on social networks every day, we are now some kind of isolated from real world. We spend much time reading others status, sharing others posts and playing games. We are tired of this. From my observation, nowadays, less and less people create original posts, most of the time; they are only willing to read others shares and if they find they are interesting, they will re-share them. But they refuse to create their own.

In conclusion, because of the reasons externally and internally, I think Google+ will be a Ghost City in the future.

GOOGLE+  SOCIAL FAYIGUE  USER BASE  GHOST CITY 

       

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  4 COMMENTS

JLam [Reply]@ 2012-02-28 10:02:09
I don't know that it's fair to call Google+ a ghost town yet because people do legitimately use it, it's just that the percentage of active users is still very small. I think that history will show that Google really screwed up Google+ by trying to clone Facebook. A clone of a popular social site without any users is worthless. Google probably should have tried several different smaller approaches with smaller teams and tried to find something that people liked rather than simply try and copy Facebook's success. We all know that Google wanted to duplicate Facebook's success to try and get access to all of this social data for their search experience. And between all of the big brands trying to promote their Facebook pages even in TV ads, the sheer number of companies listed at http://www.buyfacebookfansreviews.com that do nothing other than promote business pages, and the way that the market is reacting to Facebook's IPO, we know that they're getting significant traction that Google wants to emulate. Even though it will take years, I think Pinterest has got a shot of being the solid #2 to Facebook rather than Google+ just because they're offering a different experience. If all Google+ can offer is a Facebook clone that doesn't have active users, then there's no incentive really created for people to flock to it. I could be wrong, but I see Pinterest taking off and Google+ being largely left behind here.
sonic0002 [Reply]@ 2012-02-28 10:51:43
Yeah,I agree with you. Initially, Google want to compete with Facebook, so to compete, they need a similar product which has similar functions with facebook. But they don't innovate much on Google+.
Xtraterraneo [Reply]@ 2012-04-29 07:17:40
I do have a google+ account a3 facebooks accounts that I use once in a month, just to talk to some fellas of mine who can only be accessedd in those places. As you were saying and acurately, Google is just a clone of facebook, and people find it defficult to move to another "same thing" and start all over again, once you already have something well constructed in facebook. I tried myself to attract some of my friend google+ but unfortunatelyI failed, I did it because i love google, not cause it is somewhat more interesting than facebook. I think inovation is the key. People left HI5 and moved to facebook becausethey came out with something new, it wasn´t another HI5, it was facebook, and they could do something diferent. The best aproach would be to study what are the things that other social networks lack, and what people find boring in them, what are the new expectation. There is now a conection of Microsoft Messenger and facebook, you can be in both by simply being at one of them. I hope people there at Google find out amusing new things to be done on Google+ in other to make the diffence.
TChipepe [Reply]@ 2012-05-01 05:48:06
I am from Angola, and I love coding and I have a google+ account. first time I created my Facebook was because a link from a webpage stated that I could find programmers on Facebook and could share their experience with me. As soon as I get there I find a lot lames, "wiseless" people of all kind, talking bullshit, of course off there interesting, but nothing relevant. The most interesting I found were the Universities pages where people posted experience and things from science discoveries. In the other hand when I close my account on Facebook, I didn't belong there,I moved to google+, for my surprise, just in the very first day I found a lot of interesting people sharing knowledge of all kind, an most of the people who where in coding software world had an account there. from this a concluded that facebook is for those who want pure entertainment, who are tired after a work day and need to chill out, so they hang out with those who love to talk nonsense things but pretty interesting for them, and Google+ is for people who want to talk about advanced topics in science and development, not that bullshit doesn´t exist there but it is less than Facebook. That are also people who share knowledge in Facebook chatting but they are in a very small number. Facebook is about the rest of the world who love fantasies instead of truth, and google+ is for the elite of knowledge. And I don´t wonder why there are a lot of people in facebook they make up the majority. I want to get knowledge so I go to google+. And i don´t beleave that it is going to be a ghost city.

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