A 41% drop from the "honeymoon" spike is really not that bad. A lot of companies have seen far worse.
Google+ is a great product, but what I think is happening is that "social" is starting to play itself out. It's not new and fun anymore. If Google+ puts forward a mediocre showing, it won't be a result of any failure of the product, but because it was a late entrant into a game that's winding down.
(I'd like to avoid too much discussion of Real Names. As ill-advised as the RN policy may be, Facebook has a similar policy. By the way, RN is not about being "evil". It's about requiring people to use a certain utility as a social networking site and not as "something else". A Real Names policy sends the message, "We want these use patterns only". The problem is that culture is emergent and "social" can't be enforced from the top down. When you try to control culture in a heavy-handed manner, you piss people off.)
I remember when I started using Facebook. I thought I was coming in at the tail end of the thing (October 2004) although, in hindsight, it was just beginning. The product was buggy and crappy, but it filled a real need on a college campus (getting in contact with people you met briefly) and it was fun. The weekend after it came to my college, we had people in the computer labs at 4:30am using Facebook.
The bureaucratic and cultural nightmare of "Real Names" wasn't an issue on a college campus, because a non-RN profile wouldn't have been useful in Facebook's original context. There was no need for a heavy-handed policy, as non-RN profiles would just be ignored.
"Social" isn't fun anymore. It's not that interesting a space. It's about as enthralling as an electric bill. Facebook is losing U.S. activity. All of this certainly isn't Google+'s fault. It's just that people are expecting more (but the amorphous "more" consisting of people not knowing quite what they want) from social and no one has figured out how to deliver it.
My best guess is that "social" is going to be dormant and very boring for the next few years. It won't "end", but it will gradually get blander. None of the major players (Facebook, Google+, and Twitter) are going to die but disruption and true innovation are going to be scant. Most efforts in "social" will be about scaling and shaving milliseconds off of latency benchmarks: important stuff, but very boring from a user's perspective. People aren't going to make friends they wouldn't otherwise make because a social networking site is 25 ms faster.
Then, there will be a radical revision of "social". It will be given a new name, as "social" has been used too much by douchebags. The disruption might come from a rogue group of "intrapreneurial" innovators within Google+ or Facebook. Or it might come from one of the lesser (but more interesting and purposeful) concerns like Meetup. Or, it might come from a startup that doesn't exist now. But I feel that there will be something exciting in social mid-decade.
What I think it will look like is a "programmable" ecosystem where people can develop their own "social" software, without having to learn complicated APIs and authentication systems. App Stores are a predecessor. Collaborative project support and multiplayer user-created games are next. Accessible and cheap "cloud computing" (i.e. relational databases that scale instead of the unmanageable horror that is sharded MySQL) will come later. My best guess is that we'll start to see the first innovations in this direction around 2013-14. What's keeping it from happening sooner is not a hard technical blockage, but a lack of interest from entrenched players. The best way to get into "social" right now and stand a chance of doing something interesting (not overnight, but in time) is to build tools that make genuinely interesting development, with low overhead and an allowance for part-time contribution, easier.
What about google+ hangouts ? It's new , it's fun, and maybe even radical (may make video chat popular).
It could easily be the new social: With it's currently addictive quality , plus more video content , plus social games.
But it has a few issues:
1. Scaling - it's to scale hard at the google level, maybe even hard to scale at the isp level (depending on demand).
2. High cost - it needs a different business model than the usual google adwords/data-mining models.
3. Hangouts could be a usefull asset in their fight for the tv and tablet markets. So opening it up depends on other considerations.
So maybe the current google+ is just an experiment(to test scalability and user response) and that's the reason for the limiting invite process and the lack of advertising .But when all the pieces we'll be ready they'll launch in full scale.
A 41% drop is not that bad if you manage to get millions of visitors to a WebMD type site. It's horrible if you're Google and want to be a major competitor to Facebook, let's face it, you're supposed to continue growing, not slowing down growth.
I never really understood anyone that thought Google+ was going to be the next big social network. It all comes down to dopamine. Google+ fails in supplying any dopamine rushes. Facebook doesn't fail as much.
I really wanted them to be. They definitely have enough talent to have been so. The way they described themselves, they were exactly what I was looking for. But (my opinion only) they turned out to be full of bullshit and meh.
But the majority of G+ users are probably going to disagree with me. They may not ever be a serious competitor to Facebook (and who says they need to be?), but they probably will make a lot of money with it.
Google+ is a great product, but what I think is happening is that "social" is starting to play itself out. It's not new and fun anymore. If Google+ puts forward a mediocre showing, it won't be a result of any failure of the product, but because it was a late entrant into a game that's winding down.
(I'd like to avoid too much discussion of Real Names. As ill-advised as the RN policy may be, Facebook has a similar policy. By the way, RN is not about being "evil". It's about requiring people to use a certain utility as a social networking site and not as "something else". A Real Names policy sends the message, "We want these use patterns only". The problem is that culture is emergent and "social" can't be enforced from the top down. When you try to control culture in a heavy-handed manner, you piss people off.)
I remember when I started using Facebook. I thought I was coming in at the tail end of the thing (October 2004) although, in hindsight, it was just beginning. The product was buggy and crappy, but it filled a real need on a college campus (getting in contact with people you met briefly) and it was fun. The weekend after it came to my college, we had people in the computer labs at 4:30am using Facebook.
The bureaucratic and cultural nightmare of "Real Names" wasn't an issue on a college campus, because a non-RN profile wouldn't have been useful in Facebook's original context. There was no need for a heavy-handed policy, as non-RN profiles would just be ignored.
"Social" isn't fun anymore. It's not that interesting a space. It's about as enthralling as an electric bill. Facebook is losing U.S. activity. All of this certainly isn't Google+'s fault. It's just that people are expecting more (but the amorphous "more" consisting of people not knowing quite what they want) from social and no one has figured out how to deliver it.
My best guess is that "social" is going to be dormant and very boring for the next few years. It won't "end", but it will gradually get blander. None of the major players (Facebook, Google+, and Twitter) are going to die but disruption and true innovation are going to be scant. Most efforts in "social" will be about scaling and shaving milliseconds off of latency benchmarks: important stuff, but very boring from a user's perspective. People aren't going to make friends they wouldn't otherwise make because a social networking site is 25 ms faster.
Then, there will be a radical revision of "social". It will be given a new name, as "social" has been used too much by douchebags. The disruption might come from a rogue group of "intrapreneurial" innovators within Google+ or Facebook. Or it might come from one of the lesser (but more interesting and purposeful) concerns like Meetup. Or, it might come from a startup that doesn't exist now. But I feel that there will be something exciting in social mid-decade.
What I think it will look like is a "programmable" ecosystem where people can develop their own "social" software, without having to learn complicated APIs and authentication systems. App Stores are a predecessor. Collaborative project support and multiplayer user-created games are next. Accessible and cheap "cloud computing" (i.e. relational databases that scale instead of the unmanageable horror that is sharded MySQL) will come later. My best guess is that we'll start to see the first innovations in this direction around 2013-14. What's keeping it from happening sooner is not a hard technical blockage, but a lack of interest from entrenched players. The best way to get into "social" right now and stand a chance of doing something interesting (not overnight, but in time) is to build tools that make genuinely interesting development, with low overhead and an allowance for part-time contribution, easier.