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"\"Online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.\" With these words on June 28, 2011, Google introduced its most ambitious stab yet at breaking Facebook's hold on social media: Google+. Yet a year later, it's Google+ that needs fixing. \nGoogle+ looks good on paper: The company claims it has in excess of 170 million users and compared to Facebook it's a much cleaner experience. You can also do a lot of cool stuff on it, like set up an impromptu video chat with your friends and neatly divide your social relations into \"Circles\" that differentiate close friends from friends, friends from acquaintances, and so on. Update: At IO on Thursday, Google stated it now had 250 million Plus users. Facebook stated on April 23 that it had 901 million users. \nBut Google+ is no Facebook killer. When G+ launched, Facebook had about 700 million users. Now it has more than 900 million, meaning Facebook grew by more than G+'s total population over the past year. Moreover, Google+ is a ghost town: A well-circulated report from comScore in February showed users spent, on average, 3.3 minutes a month on the site in January vs. seven hours on Facebook. After that, comScore stopped releasing such time-spent metrics, but another researcher, RJ Metrics, found \"active\" users on G+ took an average of 12 days between each post and 30% of people who visit G+ post once and then never return again. Update: At IO on Thursday Google introduced new user metric stats. The company says it has 150 million \"30-day actives,\" however it should be noted that that figure includes not just use on Google+, but also on YouTube, Android Marketplace and Google.com. The company also says its \"daily active\" users spend 12 minutes a day \"on the stream.\" However, comScore's figures referred not just to daily active users, but to \"visitors using personal computers.\" \nThat sound you're hearing right now is the clattering keyboards of hundreds of die hard G+ fans typing emails and comments, insisting that G+ is actually a thriving community. They are right. Among a select group, G+ is a Facebook replacement and many are on it all day. However, they are part of a rarefied subculture, the equivalent of Deadheads or Phish fans in a Rihanna world. For most, barring a few tech gadflies like Robert Scoble and Tom Anderson, Google+ is an afterthought; a third or fourth social network to keep track of that you can forget about for days or even weeks.\nIt didn't have to be this way. When Google+ rolled out, there was a lot of good will. After a week or two, some people even decided that they were done with Facebook and would henceforth be Plussers. For such users, Google+ represented a clean break from the past. With a new social network, you could leave behind all those people you friended years ago and now wished you didn't. G+ was America to Facebook's Europe, a new Eden for serious social networkers.\nBut Google managed to thwart that benevolence with a few boneheaded moves. One was disallowing aliases (\"No one is forcing you to use it,\" sniffed Chairman Eric Schmidt. \"It\u2019s obvious for people at risk [of privacy intrusion] if they use their real names, they shouldn\u2019t use G+.\") Another was taking its time to allow news organizations to publish on the platform. Finally, the coup de grace was an astounding four-month abeyance before allowing brands to set up profiles on G+. \nTaken together, these decisions undercut G+'s unique selling proposition \u2014 as a less homey, more professional version of Facebook. In other words, a cross between Facebook and Twitter. But to make that happen, Google needed to embrace all the things that make Twitter interesting, including the fake parody accounts, marketing and, especially news, where G+'s ability to show a thumbnail for a story gave it a solid advantage over the picture-less Twitter.\nIt's understandable why Google initially resisted adding aliases, news and brands \u2014 it wanted to make sure it had its ducks in a row before rolling out Google+ in earnest. But that was a mistake. By keeping potential mayhem to a minimum, Google made G+ boring. By barring marketers from the platform for so long, it alienated people who were initially excited about G+'s marketing possibilities, but, four months on, had growth skeptical and resentful. \nYou don't get do-overs for this kind of thing. Google is now, as expected, frantically adding G+ to every conceivable Google product to try to entice more people on board. As Roland Smart, VP of marketing for Involver, a social media marketing firm, notes, Google has things ass-backwards: \"They made these amazing apps and tried to get this social fabric to self-assemble between these products. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s the way people approach social relationships. I'm going to reach out to you because we both use Microsoft Word.\"\nThe Microsoft comparison is apt, though Google suffers by the comparison. Just as Microsoft was caught flat-footed by the first web browser, Netscape, in 1994, Google's business was disrupted by Facebook about a decade later. Microsoft reacted swiftly (if unethically) by rolling out its own browser, the much-unloved Internet Explorer, in 1995 and bundled it with Windows. In comparison, Google took about five years to counter the Facebook threat. It was late to the party and then bungled Google+'s introduction. \nNow Facebook is having the last laugh. As for Google, instead of fixing online sharing, it has added a needless layer of complexity. A year on, Plus is a big minus."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/06/28/google-plus-one-year-later/>