All Things Tech & Social

I love G+ but one of the things I have come to notice is that although the service is great and useful, many of the hardcore users (power users) don’t seem to recognize that they are operating in a bubble. The average “hyper” utilization of this site is by people who are either 1) conscious of all things “tech” or 2) Google heads. There’s nothing wrong with this, but in regards to product growth this is not a “telling” occurrence because average Facebook users aren’t tech savvy, aren’t Google heads (or Googlers) and are less likely to redirect their brand loyalty to a service that doesn’t offer anything monumentally “revolutionary”.

“Hyper” G+ users appear to be convinced that once G+ is opened to the public, it will be the beginning of Facebook’s demise. It’s not that simple or easy. As I mentioned earlier, it would take a “revolutionary” user experience for people to redirect their usage from a service that is used by 1 out of 8 people on this planet. It would take more then a couple “flashy features” to move large amounts of users and here’s why: Facebook has progressed in a way that is allowing it to be viewed and used less as a product of luxury and more as a product of necessity (whether it really is or not). It has real utility. It has become the fabric of how people communicate and keep in touch. That’s too big of an impression for too big of an audience to easily cast it aside for the new “toy”. Facebook has effectively developed a level of “social dependency”.

In some aspects G+ is “evolutionary”, but overall (minus hangouts) there are no other major features (as of yet) that would redirect the interest of an average Facebook user. G+ will have an amazing chance to grow and be a worthwhile experience, but this has less to do with threatening Facebook’s operational purpose, and more to do with G+ changing the way we interact and relate to the information around us, because socially informative interactions (through G+) would be at the core of the “Google experience”. This in my opinion is why it would grow: it would be serving a different purpose, which means that although it may not attract the average Facebook users, it may attract a new kind of user (outside of the tech savvy and Google head users).