Google + pages

It was to be expected: it isn’t enough to be a leader to avoid to revise one’s own strategies. It’s clear that Google doesn’t process Facebook hegemony in social networks field and that it’s afraid of the integration process that Zuckerberg company is pursuing and that could erode Google monopoly as universal search engine.

Mountain View’s strategy is based on a non-stop development of new features and applications that can become essential items of our ordinary life but also a hidden “social attack” to find Facebook fails and offer something better.

It didn’t work with Wave and Buzz, now all hopes are on “+”: we spoke about Google + when it was released only at invitation and we liked some aspects but being someway hesitant about others.

Conceptually only little details have been modified since then: now it’s open to everyone but although the company is optimist about numbers we’ve to say that users statistics they declared – 40 millions is a good amount – are nothing compared to the near billion members of the main competitor.

Obviously “+” will gradually increase this figure but it seems that the gap will be the same. I think that many facebook users created their own Google + account but are no more using it.

The original idea of Google + was to create a structure with almost all Facebook advantages without contents overloading and adverts everywhere: surely it’s an interesting concept and we’ve to appreciate the cleanliness and effectiveness of the layout, it’s a different approach.

To underline that it’s a good project it’s enough to say that Facebook, despite its position, immediately grabbed some features like circles (re-called lists).  From the beginning it was clear that + aimed to be a more functional / less commercial social network, with a total block to business-oriented activities ( with consequent removal of those accounts which were used as brand pages).

Intransigence could really be a value but in this cane it has been counterproductive in particular for social commerce: we speak about this in another post.

It’s obvious that they took measures , it’s better to change policy than waste huge investments.

So, a bit behind the times, brand pages are here: their resemblance to facebook ones is clear. Pages owners are able to post contents, messages and use hangouts function to be in relationship with members and followers.

The distintive features concern PII management which should be less invasive and company-oriented. Google’s approach it to mix social activities with search engine capacities to increase visibility and availability on web. This is probably the ace of Mountain View social network and it’s clear that they don’t want to skimp on energies in the struggle against competitors.

It will be possible to find business pages directly form Google via Direct Connect simply by adding a “+” before the word we’re searching. New features will be introduced in the near future such as an advanced analytics system, badges and ripples: ripples are an innovative method to check our posts’ success and spread over the web.

All this efforts prove Google’s will to give competitors no respite by introducing constantly new applications in a little time: we’ll see if this is enough to create a real competition.