Google Plus: RIP

Last month we did a depressing post about Google Plus, and one month later the situation has only worsen.

Google Plus, Google’s effort to compete Facebook, has already been in the slumps due to executional flaws that Google committed during and after the launch of product. (we discussed them in our last post linked above)

Absence of business pages has definitely it’s role in the decline of Google+, but I have known users who never got the invite to join Google Plus until they gave up.

After two months of it’s launch, one can easily witness the decline in usage and the lack of interest from Google Plus users. This has been proven by a research firm called 86n, which mentions that Google+ public posts declined by 41 percent over past two months.

86n’s data indicates that the average number of public Google+ posts per day has decreased from 0.68 public posts per day between 19 July 2011 and 19 August 2011 to 0.40 public posts per day between 19 August 2011 and 14 September 2011.

googleplus

Remember that these figures are for public posts only, while Google+ offers private posts too but that are believed to be of nominal rate.

Is this the time for Google to make it’s mind to not to waste resources on social network and to focus on it’s core business? Or they will put another few months before they quit? What you say?


  • there is no text chat option in g+ or when u are using g+ u dont know that how many friends are online at the same time.it feels alone there.

  • Its very early to say RIP for google+. Google+ just released its APIs. I think its same as in the beginning of android, iphone users were hesitant of switching to android but as the time passes things changed. Currently ppl are hesitant to move all their data from facebook to google+ but soon hopefully this will change.

    Google+ provides much better privacy thn facebook and i think their games section is very nicely done.

  • this is remake of facebook. ppl will not easily accept change, may be g+ get more popularity in future, due to strong privacy features that FB is not offering.

  • Too early to declare it dead. I guess author was short of topics so offered namaz-e-janaza of alive to attract more attention

  • Why is that so, that I read articles over here after reading the same on gizmodo/techcrunch/lifehacker/mashable etc

    guys we already have a gazillion websites covering international news bites.. please I want the old propakistani back.. where we had solely pakistani scene on.

    • Ahsan thanks for Feedback – however, there are certain things that we include based on the fact that we Pakistanis use them and are concerned about them… Having said this, we will try to avoid intl tech (with no local link) in future.

      • No you should not avoid posting about international tech..what the hell up is with you people..this is a technology blog and it is meant to post stuff regarding tech regardless of its nature being local or international..pro pakistani has improved a lot in terms of its readers and people have started giving productive comments..which is a really good sign..why not to make it another international website..see redmondpie.com it is run by a pakistani dude in karachi..it is of international popularity..even Barack Obama follows it..so stop being conservative and let pro pakistani people do what they are doing..

      • I have stated this again and again, after the expansion of your website, things have started to change as more and more authors are starting to jump on the bandwagon, but the essential thing which I loved is to read about the pakistani IT/Telecom scene, which we could not read anywhere else apart from a tidbit news in the mainstream media.

        I really appreciate the work you guys are doing.
        the number of articles your site generate isn’t important vs to content you guys put into it.

        regarding another bro who said redmondpie, please note that it started off covering all the international things not as propakistani. being from Technopreneurship Majors, I can assure finding your niche and staying in it is the best way for a blog like this to thrive and grow.

        I extend my humble thanks to everyone who supports this website.

  • Lets not copy stuff from international websites. Focus on what you are good at – The Geo of Pakistan Telecom (and I do not mean that as a complement)

  • THIS POST IS LIKE “LOOKING IN THE TUNNLE AND CONCLUDING ON RESULT”.

    Author of the post must dig deep Technology trends and then conclude accordingly. By just taking side of one company due to personal affiliations and concluding that rest all are failed companies is not RIGHT strategy to writer.

    Please go through below blog, a much authentic blog that do research before writing any thing.

    source: http://j.mp/ogeFS8

    Is Facebook really the new Yahoo?

    At this point, Facebook is clearly the undisputed 600-pound gorilla of the social-networking world, having vanquished Myspace and virtually all other competitors, with more than 600 million users and billions of dollars in revenue, and the ubiquitous “like” button installed on hundreds of millions of websites. But other web giants have toppled before, or are in the process of toppling — like Yahoo, for example, which seems to be drifting aimlessly, waiting to be broken up. In a blog post at Datamation, writer Mike Elgan argues that Facebook is the new Yahoo: a fading giant reduced to copying other networks like Twitter and Google+ instead of innovating. Is he right?

    In a nutshell, Elgan argues that Facebook didn’t really come up with anything all that new or interesting that would justify its massive growth and current position at the top of the social-networking food chain. All it really did, he says, is come along at the right time: a time when the combination of technology and social behavior online was primed for the introduction of a social network that anyone could use. By starting with universities, it slowly built critical mass until it effectively became the default social network for an emerging generation. Says Elgan:

    At just the moment when the world was ready for everybody using social networks, Facebook let everybody in… Facebook’s “idea” isn’t particularly interesting. Its design isn’t revolutionary. The company’s engineering isn’t especially impressive. But Facebook’s timing has been perfect.

    Elgan goes on to say that Facebook’s time has come and gone — that so much of the web has become social that a single all-encompassing network is no longer necessary.

    Facebook knows what its members apparently do not, which is that today’s Facebook won’t allow the service to survive on the social Internet of tomorrow. Facebook used to be special. But now social is everywhere. Facebook finds itself trying to sell snow to Eskimos.

    Too big to innovate, but big enough to fail?

    As a result, Elgan argues that Facebook is trying desperately to launch new things and more or less failing with most of them. As examples, he gives the social network’s location-based Places and group-buying Deals offerings — both of which have been shut down, or at least drastically reduced in scope — and the launch of Facebook mail and the all-in-one inbox, which he says no one really uses. In addition, the network has been reduced to just copying Google+ by adding new list features and the new “subscribe” option, he says.

    So is this all just “flame-bait,” as a commenter on Hacker News described it? In part, perhaps. Elgan’s piece goes overboard in some directions: for example, Facebook’s programming is fairly complex, and some of the failed offerings he mentions are arguably a sign of a company trying to remain innovative. At least Facebook moves a lot faster than some other web behemoths — including Yahoo and AOL — when it comes to killing off or reinventing its failures.

    When it comes to the copycat aspect of Elgan’s argument, there’s some truth to that charge. As Farhad Manjoo points out at Slate, there’s a consistent theme running through Facebook’s history that involves being a “fast follower” — in other words, not inventing a new concept, but introducing a better version of something that has been around for a while (just as Facebook itself followed Friendster and other networks). That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Making it easier for people to filter their friends is probably a good idea, although I’m less sure about the benefits of letting people subscribe to posts, since that is a pretty major departure from the “symmetrical” friends-only approach the network was built on.

    Facebook has lots of users, but how much are they worth?

    So does the comparison to Yahoo have any truth to it? Yahoo is also a gigantic web company, with hundreds of millions of regular users — it’s consistently number two in most web traffic rankings — and has a huge advertising business based on all those eyeballs, just as Facebook does (although Yahoo creates content, and Facebook doesn’t). And that ad-based focus is the biggest risk for the social network when it comes to avoiding Yahoo’s fate: Facebook has shown it can aggregate users, but it still has to prove its ads are better than the regular kind Yahoo and AOL have been flogging for a decade or so.

    In the end, Facebook’s biggest challenge is just its sheer size. With over 2,000 employees and 700 million users, it’s a lot closer to being Yahoo or Google than it is to the plucky startup whose CEO wears flip-flops and has a business card that says “I’m CEO, b****.” At that size, it isn’t enough that a new offering like Places or Deals is cool or even useful — it has to immediately appeal to hundreds of millions of users, and produce a billion or so in ad revenue, or it’s just not worth doing. That’s why Google has been paring back the things it offers that aren’t working.

    One thing Elgan points out might worry Facebook even more: the idea that being a large social network where people can see who has a birthday — or share photos of their graduation, or play games with virtual farm animals, or pretend to be a Mafia don — just isn’t that interesting any more. The real nightmare might not be that Facebook becomes the new Yahoo, but that it becomes the new Microsoft: huge and profitable, but also boring.

    Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Stephen Brace

  • Google+, outside the “Tech Geeks Circle” is still a ghost town. Facebook has 750 million users and Gmail still has 200 million. Google+ has a long long road ahead.

  • i personally planed to use google + and leave facebook, but my lot of friends just make account on G+ but nobody used that.

    now facebook updated them according to G+, they introduced new features and solved privacy issues . which was bcoz of G+


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