The feeling exhibited by the current tide of social media offerings is that everyone is attempt to our maneuver each other. At this point you have the obvious Facebook and Twitter but even now Google has entered the foray with Plus. What is interesting is that Google announced plus a month before I landed on Diaspora and the two look eerily similar. Both have a clean minimalistic feature that funnily enough reminds me of the difference that Facebook was when it openly took on MySpace.
The difference is that Facebook has learned from the failure of MySpace and improved enough to maintain their market share. This is not to say that GooglePlus has fallen short it’s just that in this arena I believe that Google may have miss calculated. The problem is that they only offer yet another channel of noise in an already over crowded experience. At this point (I over heard someone remark) GooglePlus remains an Empty playground. You only need look at the list of early adopters compared to the ones that jumped on board when it opened up.
No one’s grandmother or even children are going to step off of Facebook the now ubiquitous social media platform. The current user base is made up of the same early adopters and curious nothing more. Sadly they did not really make any earth shattering improvements. It is rather quite a disappointment to be honest.In fact with they’re blatant disregard for stand social media meme for instance take HASHTAGs. Google has gone to great lengths to rend hashtags irrelevant in their search metrics.
The reason is that they have fallen into the trap of trying to corner the social media market. This is simply amounts to another attempt at reinventing the wheel. In fact I Google has stopped allowing Twitter to influence their page ranking algorithm. Why would they decide to pick up their toys and build their own sand box? If you listen to their CEO and marketing fluff it’s because they want to build an environment that is open for everyone, however how open can their environment be if they are continually cutting users off from their tools?
Take Yelp for example if Google were truly concerned about transparency and open solution then why would the disconnect Yelp from their search traffic? When because they bought their own equivalent with Zagat. Google is engaging in practices that can only be summed up as predatory. Every step they are taking is to ensure their continued dominance in two key areas search and advertising.
Google built something that people neither need nor wanted. Honestly they got sucked into the Field of Dreams theory and will soon be adding this to an ever growing list of failed experiments. At this point everyone in the startup community is looking for the next big social media player. Everyone is trying to reinvent the same wheel over again. Honestly we do not need more options just better ones.
Related articles
- Four Signs Google+ Might Not Be Doing So Well (blogworld.com)
- Field of Dreams Theory (jafdip.com)
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