The new
social network service from
Google, Google+, is getting personal with
Facebook . It has been just over a month since the release of the
social network service from
Google that is playing catch-up with Facebook.
Yet, Facebook is on its way to a public offering next year that could value itself at almost $100billion and to be honest has placed itself in a very, very strong position with over 750million users.
Even though Google have admitted they are late on the social network scene and have realised that identity and personalisation is critical to the social experience for consumers.
Yet, does this mean it is the end of the search engine? Google's commercial success pushes its market value to over $200billion and they hold data on the browsing histories of most of the online population. Does this mean we will see more of an emphasis on Google+?
Apparently not, Google+ is just another layer on top of the search engine that simply accesses the same information in a different way. Google+ may very well be a great, and more importantly a better attempt at a social networking tool then
Google Buzz, but we have to admit it does lack the human focus that is required to fuel a
social network site to be able to boast over 750 million users.
Google is certainly heavily engineered in order to be personal offering the results most wanted by us based on our browsing history.
It is important for marketers in getting their
messages out through those social network connections for it does not just contain people but brands, universities and institutions that people choose to context to.
However, what is more important is creating a living record helped by the push from both Facebook and Google+ to keep real names.
Even though Google and Facebook will battle it out to become the ultimate social network site, the war will be won by the one who has managed to rake in the cash. Google made 97% of its revenues in the last 12 months from
advertising alone, a total of £20billion. It seems this is an area that Facebook needs to pay attention considering there total ad-generated revenue in 2009 was a meagre £450million.