If you’ve been following our blog, you will notice that we have posted many a narrative on how Twitter has changed and how it no longer supports it’s early adopters or those looking to maintain true, digital relationships, with friends, and colleagues. Moreover, our Twitter sentiment, at the end of the day, has always been (at least for the past 16 months or so) that given the commercially focused changes made to Twitter, there is room for something else to disrupt the social network space.
With the launch of Google + we’ve seen many posts, comparing it to Facebook and talking about user adoption of Google + and their rejection of Facebook. We here are more interested however, in if and how Google+ will effect Twitter usage, based on everything we said, above.
Firstly, and for more remedial purposes, let’s get clear the different components, one gets with Google+:
Circles: allows me to build my personally labeled groups and place those who I follow in their appropriate bucket. Similar to Twitter’s lists, but much much easier to create, and manage. You can still search for folks to follow, based on industry and relevance, but again, you can group them appropriately
Sparks – allows me to share items I find with a selected group of people who I know share the same interest
Hangouts – a group video chat service
Instant Upload - self explanatory - it uploads photos from your mobile phone to the Web instantly
Huddle – group chat on steroids
The above was a rudimentary explanation of the Google + variables and you can get a more eloquent run down here. We’re more interested in how these elements, even in their early days, will impact Twitter, the one social network we feel needs an immediate overhaul.
How Google + Beats Twitter
1. Rocky Road for Twitter Over the Past 16 Months
Google +, to be fair to Twitter, had a chance to sit back and learn from the mistakes made by Twitter and their user grumblings and to some extent, the errors of Google Buzz. So, you will find that Google + will come with some out of the box features that make it tons easier to manage. However, let’s not forget the biggest product production aid of all time — it’s still in private beta (probably one of the largest I have ever seen), with more than 1 million users (estimate) participating, engaging and providing feedback to Google engineers.
2. Hard to Manage Lists and Follower Streams
In addition, to the general mishaps with the sites business model, another one of Twitter’s drawbacks today is that users need to create multiple profiles to streamline their outgoing messages and or they need to create hard to manage lists, to streamline their incoming content. Google + aids you in managing all of that in set up. A big plus here, as it also means that my access to the information I want to utilize will be that much more easier to get at, when compared to Twitter.
3. Commercial Versus the Private User
Twitter’s other flaw, which some may argue is not realized yet, but we argue it will soon be coming to pass, is the integration with commercial advertising. The folks at Twitter themselves have talked about how they plan to add elements to the micro-blogging site that will give advertisers more prevalence and these items include, adding commercial ads amongst your Twitter stream. A major intrusive point! Now, in the early stages, there are no certainties about how much monetization will be enough for Google and their + product. One can argue that with users “+’ing” data, we are enhancing their search mechanisms and making them more pointed for our network of friends and or people who are similar to us. This type of targeted communication is priceless and hard to find and therefore it could be argued that this is a form of monetization, being realized by Google.
In the end, the point is that Google+ makes collaboration and communication easy, pointed and relevant and this is something Twitter has lost over the past 16 months. Now, it’s true, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about Twitter in the above, as we feel they will feel the brunt of the Google+ arrival, more than Facebook will. Facebook will still be the location that the not so web savvy may stay for some time, but Twitter has made so many shifts in their business model that their user base is now, as they say, ‘fair game’!
