Government Technology reports that last week Google Engineer Steve Yegge inadvertently shared a post on his public Google+ profile, criticizing Google+. Government Technology reports that during the invite only stage Google+ claimed 120 million unique visitors, but since the invite-only period
has closed, traffic has dropped by 60%.
GovBytes reports:
In Yegge’s post he went on to describe Google+ as “a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product.” Yegge argued Facebook succeeds because it is built to make others make it great, whereas Google tried to build a great social network internally.
I rarely use my Google+ account, if I do it is mainly to use the Google Hangout feature, but I have yet to post any content or share information to my page. I use Gmail and Gchat constantly, but have yet to get hooked on Google+. Many have argued that Google+ will ultimately succeed because it is part of the Google suite for productivity tools. We will see how Google+ evolves and if they are able to increase traffic.
Are you an active user of Google+? How do you use Google+?
I’ve dipped my toes in as well. Not sure if/how I will use it. Watching and waiting for API to come out.
I quite like Google + and probably use it more than I do FB, which initially was more to do with concerns about lack of security on FB, than anything. Plus, I find that those pop-ups and games on FB are just too annoying!
It is about the brand plus social media fatigue. Google does well with making the world’s data searchable and making collaboration on that data easy. If they could use google plus to improve google docs they would kill Microsoft. Google doesn’t like branding and therefore is pursuing a pac-man “gobble gobble” approach to expansion rather than a strategic one.
Interesting to me is the passion around the google vs Facebook debate. A blog post I wrote on this got more than 3500 reads, a lot for me, and the comments were strong on all sides.