The Mounting Minuses at Google+

This is a very damaging article regarding Google+.  I noted earlier this week [see 10 Google Tips] with all of the previously established social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn who has time to manage another one?  I use Google extensively and am on Google+ but don't currently use it.  Currently I'm trying to figure out how to manage the current ones (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) that I am using.


From the WSJ

• Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore, which didn't have data on mobile usage. 
• "Nobody wants another social network right now," said Brian Solis, an analyst at social-media advisory firm Altimeter Group. For those who already use Facebook, "Google hasn't communicated what the value of Google+ is," he said. 
• In an interview, Bradley Horowitz, a Google vice president of product management, said Google+ is designed to be more than a destination site and, as a result, is "extremely hard for any third party to measure." Rather, he said, Google+ acts as an auxiliary to Google services—such as Gmail and YouTube—by adding a "personal" social-networking layer on top of them. 
• Mr. Horowitz declined to share data about how much time people spend on Google+ but said "we're growing by every metric we care about." A Google spokeswoman said comScore's data is "dramatically lower" than Google's internal data. 

 

• Google has much at stake as it spends heavily on newspaper ads and commercials to promote Google+, including a TV spot involving The Muppets that ran during the Academy Awards. The company's main financial goal of Google+ is to obtain personal data about users to better target ads to them across all of Google. 
• To some observers, the challenges Google is facing in creating a rival destination to Facebook and Twitter Inc. evokes the problems that software giant Microsoft Corp. has had in creating a rival search destination to Google search with Bing. 
• Ben Hopper a 29-year-old photographer in London joined Google+ shortly after it launched and said he believed the service had potential.But in November, Mr. Hopper stopped using Google+. Instead, he re-focused on Facebook and social media sites like Twitter. Google+ "was an additional tool that needed time investment—time I didn't have to begin with," he said.