I think it is already a bigger problem. In past Google has always been quick to accept their failures and correct it's course but with their social networking product I think they are not willing to admit that they are a miserable failure.
Way, way too soon to declare G+ a miserable failure. It's the lynchpin to their long term strategy for maintaining their dominance and relevance in Search, which in turn is how their Golden Goose of ad revenue lays its eggs.
Whether us schmuck users like or dislike it is irrelevant. At some point, G+ will be mandatory, as someone in Slate (i think, or maybe on quora somewhere) recently wrote...
Indeed. I think Youtube's "Hey, you should use your real name!" nag to be a very unsettling sign of things to come. My friends @ the Googleplex also note that there was a large schism internally wrt the whole "real name" push, but that's all heresay anyway.
The author thinks G+ will be huge by the end of 2013, which is much too short a timeline... but otherwise I think his analysis is spot-on. Some highlights:
"Sure, there’s a social networking aspect to it, but Google Plus is really Google’s version of Google. It’s the groundwork for a level of search quality difficult to fathom based on what we know today. It’s also the Borg-like hive-queen that connects all the other Google products like YouTube, Google Maps, Images, Offers, Books, and more. And Google is starting to roll these products all up into a big ball of awesome user experience by way of Google Plus, and that snowball is starting to pick up speed and mass."
("awesome user experience" is obviously highly subjective and debatable)
"What makes Google Plus different is that it is the new backbone of a company that does search better than anyone already--something Facebook could never compete with. You use Google to search, right? Well, imagine if Google knew every piece of data about you that Facebook knew. Imagine how better equipped they would be to serve you what you are looking for. Google Plus is a way of entrenching Google’s dominance in that area, not a way of stealing Facebook users. If you are in first place, that’s the time to accelerate your lead."
and the conclusion:
"I know. You are still in the “no freaking way am I joining another social network” mode. But one day soon you will wake up and find out about that one little thing and it goes something like this:
Your buddy, “Hey have you heard about this one little thing?”
You: “Oh. My. God. That’s Awesome. That’s so Awesome. How do I get that?”
Your buddy: “Oh, you need to have a Google Plus Profile or it doesn’t work.”"
The inverse of that is the Microsoft experience - I can remember a similar resentment slowly building across the late 90s. We all still used MS products, and jumped to their tune, but the underlying resentment meant that as soon as an alternative appeared (OSX for some, ipods and/or iOS for others) we jumped as quick as we could.
I wondered that is what google would want, but I dont see how they can make G+ mandatory for their search customers. This would mean you would have to be signed into to google to search.
And it is just not that G+ is not actively used , Facebook has been adding real users and is growing. Forget the fact I won't move to G+ until 50 of my 150 friends move to g+( which is a very low # among my friends, most of them have atleast few hundered ). you will have to export your pictures and some other personalized content to another site. IMO, the best time for a new social venture to gain traction is when it is new on the block. and google has failed. honcho's at google will admit the failure and move on from the social networking space, if their compensations are not tied to g+.
Why do you think they'll move away from social? Asking because, for me, this looks like they'r going "all in" here. They want all private data and social is missing in their chain. But, hmmm, looks like it's much harder to become Big Brothers right hand >:-)
