BusinessWeek has a really nice article explaining Google+. There are a lot of articles about Google+ and how to use it. It is intriguing in the BW article about how Google has struggled with social through purchases and organic builds. Each one has resulted in what some call “catastrophic failure” to “mis-fires”. I am not here to judge. But Google certainly missed the ball a few times.
Failure is a good thing. I have written about this before and would classify myself as a fan of such – sometimes. With failure comes re-focusing and refining and usually a better product. For Google the Orkut, Buzz, and other ventures/acquisitions have been a journey to get Google+. So that is where I see Google has finally hit the sweet spot with social. They have hundreds of millions of users using their mail, chat and calendaring services and many of those have smartphones that are running Android operating systems. Add to that the fact that there are countless businesses already also are hooked in to GoogleMail (Apps) which has voice, video, and chat integration built in. That captive audience with their hands on Google+ with features like Huddles and Hangouts will change the social business platform offerings because there is nothing that would be able to rival it.
Google starts with Friendster the tries their hands on social with Orkut with limited success and then Buzz. Today they have Google+ and will quite frankly change the social scene one way or another. I would put some money on the fact that you will see other platforms scramble to meet and differentiate from Google+ and see people and companies flock to their platform.
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