Survey Says Google+ Will Catch up with Facebook
Sixty-eight percent of 2,012 developers who responded to a survey believe that Google+ will catch up with Facebook.
Nevertheless, the question is WHEN exactly will this happen?
Appcelerator and IDC surveyed Appcelerator Titanium developers from July 20-22, 2011 on perceptions surrounding mobile OS priorities, Google and Apple’s move into the ‘mobile cloud’ and application development needs.
The survey results revealed the following:
Two-thirds of respondents believe that Google can catch up to Facebook in social with Google+. When asked why, 68% of developers say that leveraging Google’s assets (eg: Search, YouTube, Maps, etc) trumps Facebook’s social graph lead. 49% say that Google shows more innovation than Facebook with new Google+ features like circles, sparks, hangouts, etc.
Further on, developers said that for the meantime, they intend to stick with Facebook.
While Google+ may be the future, today 83% of developers using social in their apps say they use or are planning to use Facebook this year. Twitter is second at 73%, followed closely by Google+ (when API is released) at 72%, LinkedIn at 30%, and Foursquare at 23%.
Blog Herald has been covering the rise in uptake of Google+ users and so far the numbers are still far from showing evidence that Google+ accounts are growing exponentially.
It can be fun to theorize that Google+ can somehow take advantage of the huge traffic from Google Search — with four billion searches a week — but that isn’t happening. Well, not yet at least.
As of July 24, Comscore estimated Google+ registered users to be at 25 million and growing at a rate of 1 million users a day — an impressive feat considering it was launched in late June. It took about two years for Facebook to attract 25 million users and Twitter took 30 months to attract the same number of users.
Most Google+ visitors come from out of the United States with 3.6 million unique visitors coming from India.
Some theories suggest that Google+ is not really social networking but a steps toward an integration of all Google’s services on one interface. Mention of a blue ocean strategy where Google+ represents a move that places Google in territory still unencumbered by heavy competition.
