Is Google+ the ‘next big thing’ in social networking? Possibly…

When Google announced Google +, those of us who are active in social media could be forgiven for thinking ‘just what we all need - another social network!’.  But, of course, Google+ was never going to be just another social network - with roughly one week under our belts, here are our initial thoughts from Red Ant towers:

Invites? We can’t get enough of them!

It’s understandable that Google sent out invites for the field trial, but so far they appear to be attracting more attention than the platform itself.  As always, whenever Google raises a fanfare, the hordes  come running - unfortunately Google+ capacity is limited at present, which means that not all of its very willing target audience have been able to participate. Hopefully capacity will be increased soon, because there are a number of things which make Google+ a very compelling platform.

Facebook it isn’t

According to Vic Gundotra, Google's Senior Vice President of Social, Google+ (Plus) is ‘not a reaction to Facebook’. While I’m not sure how much I believe that sentiment, even at the metaphor levels on the site there are distinct - albeit slight - differences which suggest that although Google realises that Plus will need to be a major foray into social networks, they know that copying the biggest isn’t necessarily the route to success.

In Plus, familiar concepts of friends and profiles remain - Google has taken them further by allowing categorisation in Circles, or groups of people that you are associated with.  As default in Circles, there are groups for Following (similar to those in Twitter), Family (as pushed recently by Facebook), Acquaintances (the LinkedIn approach) and Friends.  Already we are starting to see a multi-purposed social network, just through these categorisations.  Once Circles are populated with your connections, you can choose who can see what, both in your activity and profile.  Of course, if the default Circles aren’t enough, you can always create your own.

Minimal

It is clear that Plus is in field trial - for starters there isn’t a lot to do at the moment. The most apparent features are:

• The stream (a status feed from your Circles)
• Sparks (external news articles based on interests)
• Hangout (video conferencing and chat)

This will change soon, however, with Picasa (Google’s image / photo tool), and Blogger being rebranded for Plus (which I am sure will make Tumblr very happy), more tools are on the way.

What’s missing - businesses and developers

It is early days, but these appear to be the two biggest areas missing from Plus at present; there is no equivalent of Facebook pages and no publically available API.  I wouldn’t expect this to remain the case for long - minor amendments and changes from Google seem to be happening daily in this first week, and Google will not be slow to spot the opportunities for monetisation through bringing these communities on board (there is already a notification list sign-up for developers, for example).

Final thoughts

Google + at present is young, promising and potentially the mot juste would be ‘portentous’ (although it could all go wrong, depending on how robust their strategy is).  From the foundations it is clear that Plus has the potential to be many things to many people; tied into Google’s vast array of other tools such as Apps, Mail etc, it’s easy to imagine the growth of Plus along some very exciting routes that Facebook currently has no answer for (but there is time – their much-anticipated announcement of a partnership with Skype shows that they still have their finger on the pulse). Red Ant will certainly be keeping a very close eye on Google+.

This blog post was written by Richard Conyard

If you want to discuss this post, why not follow us on Twitter?