After Google on Tuesday unveiled its next foray into the social-media world, critics were left wondering if it will be worth their while.
GooglePlus promises easier communication between small groups, but networking giant Facebook has no need to sweat that its estimated 750 million members worldwide will abandon the site, says Josh Bernoff, analyst at Forrester Research.
"They're very unlikely to dump Facebook for GooglePlus," Bernoff says. "GooglePlus will be successful for people who want to have a simple connection with a social circle that they have, whether it's their book club or their Boy Scout troop."
GooglePlus' developers have a mission: to humanize the Internet. Google says the nuances of real-world interactions get lost in today's online tools. Such tools are broken and need to be fixed, Google says. "It's certainly our first attempt that spans all of Google," Google engineer Vic Gundotra says. "It's a social circle. We don't believe it's a social network."
Among GooglePlus features:
•Circles. You can divide your friend list into Google's Circles. Perhaps a "circle" for parents or college buddies or work colleagues — and only share status updates with a particular circle.
•Huddle. There's a text-messaging system that allows multiple on-the-go users to all communicate together; sending one message will go to all others in the group huddle.
If you're part of a "small group of people who go out every Thursday night to go drinking, it's much easier to use some of the features that GooglePlus has supplied," Bernoff says
•Hangouts. When people want to alert friends that they want to chat by video, they can log into "Hangouts" and chat with many people at once or one-on-one. Facebook doesn't yet offer this feature.
•Sparks. Tweaking Facebook News Feed concept a touch, GooglePlus' "Sparks" is a content feed that streams from various interests that users type into a search engine.
While Google has a huge case of Facebook envy in social networking, GooglePlus is not much of a threat right now. The social-networking giant would have plenty of time to match Google's features, Bernoff says.
Facebook said in a statement: "We're in the early days of making the Web more social, and there are opportunities for innovation everywhere."
However, what's unknown is how consumers will respond to GooglePlus. It's still in trial among a small group of people for testing. And several Google products — including Buzz, social site Orkut and Google Talk— never really caught fire with consumers.
GooglePlus is far more promising than the other pieces they've put together, but the "devil's in the details," Bernoff says. "It has a good chance to be successful, but that success is going to be really relatively modest compared to the huge juggernaut that is Facebook."
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