Who will lead the race of Social networking- will Google+ main Twitter or will Facebook be the loser

You might have seen a great deal of talk about Facebook versus Google+ but what will be the effect of Google+ on Twitter? I feel that more than Facebook, its Twitter which needs to be worried about competition from Google+.

I will not say that it will be a wipe out for Twitter that never happens; even MySpace still has millions of members till date. It would be better to analyze the question whether Google+ will have a maiming effect on twitter or not.

There is a lot of chit chat going on Google+ itself whether Twitter will be effected or not. These are Google+ members who are actually very actively using the service. Many of these were early adopters of Twitter and it is interesting to note that they have shifted to Google+ in a similar fast manner.

If we see the format of Google+ closely it might look a hell lot similar to Facebook but the functionalities of Google+ resemble more closely that of Twitter. I am saying this on the basis that on Google+ you follow and get followed without any reciprocation which is exactly similar to Twitter. Even taking my practical experience, Google+ is taking more of my Twitter time rather than Facebook time.

The Circles feature of Google+ is similar to the lists of Twitter except for the fact that on Twitter it is not shareable. Considering it as a business tool I find the Circles feature much more convenient than anything else.

Sharing content on Google+ is a lot more efficient than on Twitter considering the fact that it is just not the followers seeing your posts but others too if the content is marked public. This directly means that the G+ feature would lead to better marketing of a post or product.

BrightEdge Research reported that Google’s +1 buttons are being adopted much more easily than the instant like or Tweet buttons. Considering that the +1 buttons have been around only since early June, it is really an achievement.

 

It is something to note here that +1 button are not same as ‘Share on Google+’ buttons. Publishers are going for the +1 button more aggressively to influence the search engine rankings. Although, Twitter tweets do play an indirect part in it but Google has gone all out to clearly state that +1 buttons do affect search engine rankings and that’s quite enough to ensure it aggressive adoption and promotion.

While Twitter and Google have been unable to come to an understanding on use of the Twitter’s firehose but we can expect some interesting changes to take place in the real time search due to coming of Google+ into the fray. Considering that Google will have a lot of live time content at its hand will Google+ it can impact the pageviews in during the real time massively.

Twitter is five years old and it took some time to take off and it was only the previous year when it came into media focus and was consequently adopted by numerous celebrities, politicians and other people who need to keep an image in the public. Twitter started off as a small business venture with almost no funding whereas Google+ has been launched as a mammoth. Though Twitter has already made its space online but despite this growth when compared to Facebook it comes nowhere near and is still to penetrate into mainstream. Moreover, Twitter is considered to a certain extent a hub of geeks and intelligent people who like to talk serious and with a purpose.

Google+ has already exceeded the mark of 20 million and Twitter has its membership mark pegged around 300 million which will obviously require sometime for Google+ to attain. But here we also need to consider the fact that majority of this count of users are not active which is obviously similar to Google+ members. Taking an approximate figure we can say that Twitter has only 10x less than its total members as active members which means that Google+ has already amassed the all of the active user base of Twitter.

Google+ has made an entry into the market at a very sensitive point for Twitter where it was attracting the attention of the media and hot personalities which were boosting its usage. This year the head of the company as well as co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone stepped away to make space for Jack Dorsey, who also runs the hot mobile payments startup Square.

Since Dorsey has returned Twitter has seen some major changes to boost its membership as well making the platform interesting to retain existing user base. These changes include small changes like design tweaks, suggesting users as well as some major changes like acquisition of TweetDeck and the announcement of native photo sharing.

So all in all though Google+ ha some very big hurdles to come over, of them the biggest one being on how to deal with the massive 700 million user base controlled by Mark Zuckerberg. Of course it is not impossible for Google but with the doubt and fear in mind of the people on how Google will use their private information after the privacy problems in Google Wave this is going to be a hard road.

What I think is that though Facebook and Google plus are very much in competition with each other but Twitter is also very much a part of this.