By Derek AshauerGoogle Plus is not going to survive, in my opinion. Others who talk about Google+ not going to survive usually say it will be the result of their limited initial launch or that it’s just another platform users will have to check (and they eventually won’t). However…
The one thing I have not yet seen discussed about Google+ vs. Facebook is in regards to Google+’s “circles” feature. With Google+, you can create “circles” (or groups) and then share certain content with just those people. For example, my grandma doesn’t care when I find a new article related to the browser wars – she just wants pictures of her great grand daughter. Google says only on Google+ can you share content with specific users. What I don’t understand is that in fact you can do this very same thing using Facebook already*. The only difference is that Google simply promotes it more and their UI to do so is significantly easier. But give Facebook a couple months to make some simple UI changes and then the entire “advantage” to Google+ is gone. With no advantage or reason to use Google+ over well established Facebook accounts – why would anyone switch? Exactly, they won’t.
To be honest, I don’t know what “normal web users” think of Google+. In the web industry, it was all people seem to talk about for about a month after it launched. Thankfully the chatter is starting to dwindle down. If even the web industry is starting to get over it then it seems likely most casual web users are already over it.
* To do this in Facebook, edit your profile and go to “Friends and Family”. You can then create a new list at the bottom of this page and then assign the people you want to your new list. When you post a new update, click the security lock icon, choose “Customize”. You can then choose which group or list of people you want to see the update you are posting. Like I said, the UI on this isn’t simple but Facebook could easily change this without much effort in the future.
UPDATE: Just two days after this post, guess what? Facebook announces changes made to their UI to make it easier to share with you want.