I read an article today by Steve Hobson about Twitter vs. Google+, and I disagree quite a lot about the points he’s making. There’s a lot to be said about social networks, and the defining aspects that make one social network “win” while others lose. By “winning” I mean becoming successful and actually making money/sticking around for a while.
Here are a few of my points:
1) Using Google+ I have managed to connect with a large number of like-minded individuals and in a sense, “shout out” to the world. I can view posts by people in my home city, New York, and effectively reach out and participate in discussion with them. This is something Twitter does better than Facebook, but something that I believe Google+ does better than either. I mostly feel that way because you can say a lot more in a comment, and you can get more attention from other people who are not necessarily connected to you or to the person whose post you are commenting on.
2) Twitter is used all the time to share rich media - my feed is full of links to pictures or off-site articles, not just people tweeting about what they had for breakfast or lunch.
3) Twitter does have the hash tag system which enables you to search and filter tweets very effectively, although I imagine google will do everything in their power to empower content discovery, so this is likely another area in which both will be in direct competition.
3.5) Hodson also mentions that Twitter is used for staying up-to-date with current events, which is something I think Google+ can do just fine. You can “follow” a user (and soon to be business entity profiles as well) and receive all of their news updates. Twitter won’t have any advantage here.
4) The most important thing here is whether or not Google+ will become a threat to Twitter, and that will happen if Twitter users decide that Google+ does everything that they need out of a social network, and end up switching.
Which I think is also a possibility.
5) Twitter has an API that interfaces with a ton of different applications but we can expect Google to do the same.
One last point I’ll make is probably a tired out argument about the value of a 140 character post.
With such a limitation, Twitter does limit the amount of content that can be found within the twitter.com domain. Users have adapted to this, especially users who have more than 140 characters of content to share with the world, by linking to outside domains. Because of this I personally believe that Twitter misses out on all of that content. Every time you click a link, you leave Twitter. That makes Twitter even more difficult to monetize because that equals less time a person is spending looking at twitter pages/ad space. That also means that with less content, Tweets will have too little weight to show up in search engine results. I realize that Google had now incorporated (and now removed) Twitter posts into search results, but I think that this was done not because Google felt that Twitter’s platform was the best, but rather because it is out there, not able to be ignored, relevant, but unfortunately with a lifespan of minutes or seconds.
Google’s intent as a company is to control the means for the exchange of all information, so naturally they will use feeds from Google+ discussion.
In Google+, you already have more room for extended content pieces and as a result I anticipate users to spend more hours of the day on Google+ pages than they will spend on Twitter. Because Google+ is, well, Google, content will be seen by more outside eyes than on Facebook because Google search traffic is probably to be more likely to arrive back on Google+ posts.
I have some other thoughts which I can share later, but the bottom line is that I predict Google+ to be a platform which takes the best features from both Twitter and Facebook to be incorporated into Google search as the dominant conversational/blogging/content distribution channel.
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