Niall’s virtual diary archives – Monday 18th July 2011

Monday 18th July 2011: 10.05pm. My thoughts on Google Plus vs. Facebook vs. LinkedIn:

Having watched which of the people I know who have joined G+, and watching what each of these post to G+ vs. what they post to Facebook, I'd say there's a reasonably strong chance that this will become the social networking of choice for the technologically keen, while the less keen probably will stay where they are. That's probably okay for Google, as it becomes the "elite/intelligent person's choice".

However, for business use it's a good bet that employers will go for G+ far more than Facebook as it lets you cleanly segment work and personal, or even one customer's set of employees from another. Therefore on usefulness for people with high quantities of money to spend, I think G+ will definitely be a winner, maybe even more than LinkedIn as G+ is much more useful than LinkedIn which really is a fairly single purpose vehicle. If I were LinkedIn right now, I'd be worried especially as LinkedIn are trying to charge people for messaging strangers (yeah, stupid I know!).

However I'd doubt it'll beat Facebook in terms of sheer members and spread of networking unless they deploy a much superior application API e.g. if a small shop's stock recording tool (or even their smartphone running a special app) automatically plugged into their G+ circle firing stock requests at suppliers, well that I can see becoming very popular as a poor man's ERP implementation. Especially as you can also post photos and instant video chat around business topics e.g. if during your stock check you found a faded woolly jumper, you could actually show your supplier the jumper in question via live video and shout at them!

G+ has plenty further to go though. GMail is still held separate to G+ messaging. Trying to message one person is still finickety, though still to be honest it's easier to not jump into GMail for that. And G+ is very buggy, right down to still randomly reordering a person's stream, and it clearly has issues with lag in showing recent posts. Still, I have to admit, I'm actually happy to post thoughts to G+ because I can target them e.g. techie thoughts go only to techie contacts. Facebook, well it's just noise because everything is scatter gunned to everybody, and that annoys me :)

BTW, I REALLY like that I can write as much or as little as I want for my thoughts and the f-ing fascist webpage doesn't say "maximum length exceeded" like every other social networking site. And I can edit my mistakes. Go Google +!