Finding the plus side of Google+
You’ve got friends who check their Facebook feeds incessantly, and others that tweet non-stop. But how many people do you know who stay glued to Google+ all day long?
It’s been about a year since Google sent out the first invitations to its own original social network, Google+.
The goal of the site, according to Google in a June 2011 blog post, is “to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software.” And while a large body of users have been willing to give Google+ and its vision a shot, Google still seems to be fighting a long, exhausting battle against the image that its social network is “a virtual ghost town.”
It’s not that people aren’t signing up for Google+ -- they are, at a rate of 625,000 new users a day.
The site is expected to hit 400 million users by the end of 2012, which is notable, if still short of the over-800 million active users on Facebook.
To truly compete with Facebook, a factor that’s as important as number of users is the level of engagement those users have with the site. According to a recent comScore report, in a month users spent on average only 3.3 minutes on Google+, in comparison to 7.5 hours on Facebook.
Lizzie Savanella, a 2007 graduate of Fashion Institute of Technology, signed up for a Google+ account a year ago when the site launched, but she never uses it. For her, the major drawback of Google+ is that it’s missing a devoted following, at least among her friends.
“Not many of my friends seem to be using it,” she said in an email. “The few people I know who post things on Google+ seem to be older people and a few friends from Europe.”
Still, even if Facebook is ahead of Google+ in terms of its active user base, many young, college-age Google+ users are drawn to the site for its unique features. Kylie Donnelly, a rising senior at University of Alabama, said she loves the design; Google+ allows users to arrange their contacts into different “circles” for customized sharing.
For Donnelly, perhaps the biggest draw of Google+ is the Hangout feature, which allows users to video chat in a group of up to 10 people.
“Most of my friends don’t use Google+, but they have an account so that we can do group chats,” said Donnelly. “As a college student, that’s wonderful. It allows me to keep in touch with my friends, and we can all talk together without having to talk on the phone or trying to use Skype.”
Donnelly keeps a Facebook account as well, which she uses to stay in touch with friends who spend little or no time on Google+.
Ethan Pace, a rising senior at Missouri State University, is another fan of Google+ Hangouts. He said he thinks Hangout is particularly innovative for enabling users to watch YouTube videos together while video chatting.
“The fact that you can watch videos at the same time as somebody across the country and share a laugh -- I think that’s way better than anything on Facebook,” Pace said. As much as he appreciates Google+, though, he said that he mostly just uses it to connect with family. Many of his friends either don’t have Google+ accounts or don’t use them.
When asked why he thinks that, in spite of its great features, Google+ still seems to be struggling to catch on, Pace said that when it comes to social networking platforms, there’s a general resistance to change. Even little changes to Facebook formatting, like the new Timeline layout, can send users into an uproar.
“Any time there’s a Facebook update and they change the format or anything, people are constantly complaining about it,” Pace said. “They don’t even like it when Facebook changes. So to change to a completely new social network would feel pretty drastic.”
All in all, the social part of social networking is what matters most. Even though many students appreciate the plusses of Google+’s design, the site may need to build up its own circle of active users before more flock to it en masse.
Annie Massa is a Summer 2012 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here. Follow her on Twitter at @annietweetsetc
This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.