Google has a reputation for killing off its products. So much so, that there are multiple websites dedicated to tracking the company’s murders. At one of its campuses, Google made an actual product graveyard to decorate for Halloween.
Following a report back in July showing that Google+ gets only 2 percent of social sharing, new figures from Shareaholic (via Marketing Land) reveal that the service drives an average of 0.06 percent of all referral traffic. This contrasts with Facebook at 8.11 percent, Pinterest at 3.24 and Twitter at a surprisingly low 1.17.
Google+ traffic is also growing at a far slower rate than other social media.
Shareaholic also says that Google+ is growing the slowest as a referral source at just 6.97 percent over the past year. Referrals from Facebook (58.81 percent), Pinterest (66.52 percent), Twitter (54.12 percent) and YouTube (52.86 percent) all grew more than 50 percent since September 2012.
Viewed against a backdrop of Google’s aggressive promotion of the service, making it virtually impossible not to have a G+ account by linking it to every product the company has, it does make me question whether Google+ has a long-term future …
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Google has just announced on their blog that they will be shutting down Google Buzz in a few weeks. Users will be able to take out their data from Buzz with Google Takeout, but it will still be viewable on their Google Profile.
In a few weeks we’ll shut down Google Buzz and the Buzz API, and focus instead on Google+. While people obviously won’t be able to create new posts after that, they will be able to view their existing content on their Google Profile, and download it using Google Takeout.
Google also announced a slew of other products that will be closed in January of 2012, including Code Search, Jaiku, and iGoogle’s social features.
So what’s up with all of these product closures? As explained before, and also in yesterday’s earnings call, Google is trying to put more focus around core products. In today’s case it looks like these products will allow the Google team to focus more on Google+. I think we’re all fine with that, right?
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At this point, it seems pretty obvious that Google means business with the Google Plus platform. Besides all of the other areas Plus has engulfed, it looks like Google is heading into the gaming realm. The following code snippet was found in the web page code
“have sent you invites and more from Google+ Games”
So now Google is taking on Microsoft’s Xbox and Apple’s Gamecenter. Perhaps Google might want to lower the barrier to entry..
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Our invites came in and we’re up and running. Here’s the initial reactions:
The first annoying thing is that Google hasn’t allowed Apps for Domains in yet. They are “working on it”. If you are like me and have your life in a Google Domain account this is a major pain. I’m going to have to reconnect to everyone and they are going to have to put me in their circles all over again. Bad start.
Once signed in, the interface is very “Facebook feeling” Google has found a lot of people who know me or are in my contacts so adding them to circles is easy. Unfortunately my gmail.com account has a lot of people from school (when I used it last) and not a lot of the people I deal with on a day to day basis.
Friends seem to be coming in from way back in history – very Facebook like.
It will be interesting to see how Google keeps people coming in and more importantly coming back.
Because I can’t stay logged into this and my normal Apps Google account at the same time, it won’t get used very much. I imagine there are a lot of power users in this exact same boat. I wonder what Google’s plan for this is. I’m hoping there is going to be a merge button at some point in the future.
Overall, I have to say that the product feels very good…like if all of my Facebook Friends came in, I’d probably leave Facebook immediately. But how do I use both at the same time?
Check out that fresh navigation bar!
In correspondence with Google’s release of Plus, Google has released a new service called Google Takeout. Google Takeout allows users to take their data out of the cloud from a few of Google’s products. The products so far included in Takeout are Buzz, Contacts and Circles, Picasa Web Albums, and Profile. The data from these sites are put in a small .zip file, and inside you’ll be able to view your data. This service is directly related to Google’s Data Liberation Front. What a nice little tool, Google.
