Social networking has grown steadily in scope and importance over the last decade, and over the past few years, Facebook’s position as the top dog of social networking services has been solid and unquestioned. Enter Google+. Google’s attempts to step into the realm of social networking have been plentiful and almost undeniable failures, but Google+ is undoubtedly their strongest showing yet and has the best chance of success. It is growing steadily in popularity, but how well does it work and what sets it apart from its competitors? Read on.
Social Networking, Google Style
Google has a long, tumultuous, and mostly unknown buy google reviews cheap and ignored history with social networking. The following is a rundown of their previous attempts.
Orkut:As far as I am aware, this is Google’s earliest and (until now) most successful attempt at a social networking platform. It never gained much popularity in the United States, but it is huge in Brazil to this day, and it also has a following in India and other various countries.
Open Social: Launched in 2007, it’s not technically a social network in and of itself. Open Social is Google and MySpace’s attempt to create a common programming interface that can be applied across several social networks, allowing programmers to easily integrate these networks into websites and other applications. This has largely been drowned out by Facebook.
Friend Connect: Launched in 2008, Friend Connect was Google’s next attempt at a Facebook or MySpace style social network, but it took the approach of using various open standards (including Open Social) to create this network across different types of accounts and websites. I had not even heard of it until I started researching for this article.
Google Lively: This was Google’s attempt to create Second Life style 3D environments that could be installed onto any website, where users could log in with their personas and interact with each other. It only lasted for a few months before it was discontinued in 2008.
Google Wave: This was a communications format that was intended to combine features from e-mail, message boards, and social networking schemes to enable a conversation-style information exchange (or wave) that could include various type of media added by various networked contributors. Google has basically abandoned the project, but it still exists under the name Apache Wave.
Google Buzz: A social network that has been integrated into Google’s e-mail service, Gmail, since 2010. It allows people to share information with each other in a social networking format right inside of the Gmail interface. Ironically, Google Buzz has barely generated any buzz at all.