Benedict McAleenan

I think I just got what Google+ actually is

Took me a while to catch on to this. The criticism of Google+ is, if I’m right, people asking for a faster horse. They think of ‘social networks’ as the sort of websites we’ve already seen.

Except that Facebook is mid-way through a process to turn from a ‘website’ to a ‘platform’ - rated on its connectivity across content that exists all around the internet, not just facebook.com. Its success is so huge that it revolutionised all content, making shareability key and downgrading search.

Many have portrayed Google execs and engineers as dead-parrot-deniers because they defend Google+ using numbers that come from a plethora of Google services, not just the Google+ central site. But I think the parrot is alive and well. They’re talking, in the way Google used to do, about making all content across the web social. Integrating search and social. And who better to do that than Google?

This isn’t a Facebook killer in the way we think of Facebook as a ‘place’ on the internet. Instead, think of social networking as the glue that will hold the internet together - the thing between individual bits of content. It’s a way to connect the internet’s content socially, which is the puck towards which Facebook is skating.

Therefore Google+ is a real threat to Facebook’s dominance.