Google Plus - Good News Or Bad News
Larry Page had good reason to be exuberant in a statement released by Google about its third-quarter financials. It was a great quarter and revenue is up 33 percent year on year. That puts the quarterly revenue at just under ten billion dollars.
On Google Plus, he also presented good news in that more than 40 million people have now signed on. That is an impressive start and outpaces by far the initial growth patterns for Facebook and Twitter when they started.
It has also attracted some real celebrities. Famous figures have taken part in Google+ hangouts where groups of friends take part in video 'conference calls'. In past weeks, this has included the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and Desmond Tutu, retired archbishop of Cape Town, a renowned human rights activist.
However perhaps the news is not all rosy. The previous day, a senior Google engineer had inadvertently published to the world his major reservations about Google Plus. He basically feels that there is insufficient content to keep visitors on the site given that it has not been well designed as a platform via which individual developers can develop a myriad of crowd pulling attractions.
If you look at the initial traffic figures, as presented by Chitika, the dramatic drop in traffic following the initial search might well make you wonder whether people were not finding sufficient to keep them involved. The image presented shows the data as determined by Chitika Insights: those interested can check out the methodology used.
Another criticism that the Google Plus detractors raise is that Google’s Management Doesn’t Use Google+. That message seems to have made some Google faces red. Indeed Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt had not made any posts on Google + but has now corrected this with two quick posts when this situation became public.
Overall can Google Plus become real competition for Facebook. Perhaps not and perhaps it does not need to be. It may be the wrong comparison. Google Plus can certainly become a very much enriched version of Twitter and has already achieved that status .. and as Larry Page said there's lots more to come.
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