I believe I have a gift.
I believe that I can predict the future.
And my super senses tell me that Google Plus will fail.
Even without a facebook account, a great Chinese philosopher once said, about 300 years back, “The way of the world is to meet new people through other people ”
And if you look at it, this is the fundamental premise on which all social networking works on -> you find new friends through your own and on your own. And once upon a time, you could find all your childhood bum chums and chuddy buddies on orkut but later when you started getting multiple fraand-shib scraps from the neighborhood hot, sweet and sexy guy(yuck!), you moved over to facebook (moreover, everybody you know was already there). And you could connect even better with your friends through gaming, poking, sending flowers, throwing sheep and various other cool ways on facebook. And things worked out pretty well so far.
Lekin picture abhi baaki hain mere dost…
Enter Google Plus, the new social networking site from the Other Guy who has got all the answers to all your questions.
You now see yourself agreeing to God, er, sorry… Google, that :
- you do not want to have your office folk know that even though your name on office rolls is something as cool as ‘Raj Aryan Malhotra’, you are actually known as Chuppandi Ram by all your school friends; so ‘Circles’ does seem like a good idea.
- You also nod in unison that yup, it is cool that you can now chat simultaneously with 10 people on HD video chat on G+, even though you have never done that before or ever thought that you would even have a need to do so, unless it’s a meeting with your onsite clients (but who wants to have their clients to be in their friend’s list anyways?)
- You also agree that since your default browser is Chrome, your email of choice is from the G and googling is the most productive thing you do in office (besides coffee), so hence G+, from the house of Google, has got to be superb.
- You also think that since you might most probably buy a android smart phone next, so G+ will definitely have a better interface with your future phone with all the above applications (so in a way, that’s like ‘the site you don’t use on the phone that you don’t have’ J)
And finally, it’s from Google, one of the coolest company you’ve heard about. So all in all, G+ looks like a pretty darn good idea.
But my point is, you still won’t let go of your facebook account. J
My super predictive senses tell me that G+ does not have anything addictive in it to hold the attention of the user. Most of its features (superb features btw) are just me-too variations of fb or things that are slight improvements over fb. And that’s just it. Unless G comes out with something really sticky on G+, my senses tell me that Google Plus will be a minus from Google. Sure it’s still the beta version, but if the alpha version is on similar grounds, me don’t think G+ will hit the sweet spot. I predict that going forward, everyone will have both an fb and G+ accounts and that’s about it. And later due to inactivity, G+ will die a natural death; unless it comes up with something so addictive that G+ becomes the networking site of choice. Of course, my inadequate research also overlooks the opinion voiced by a few sources that G+ is not exactly competing with fb in the same space(whatever that means J) and that the market is big enough for the both players. Adding on, almost everybody I know has got a G+ account but nobody uses it for even a fraction of the number of times they use facebook. Sure stats will show that G+ notched up 20 million users in about a month but how many of them are actually as active as they are on fb?
Let me ask you three questions:
- Do you have a G+ account?
- Have you used it more than 5 times in the last week?
- Don’t you have anything better to do than read this post?
If you’ve answered ‘No’ to the third question, then screw the first two questions and follow my blog.
And about my super predictive senses, well….
I must be honest to you. I don’t have any gift of crystal gazing. I can’t even tell if my house will have gold hidden underneath it, considering that its now becoming a norm in Trivandrum for people who believe in God, Gold and Google.
Of course, I live on a hill so geologically you can’t dig there or can ever find gold...
Of course, I don’t have a house in Trivandrum…
Of course, I’m not from Trivandrum…
But I still think Google Plus will flop.
J
