Tech blog: Google+ gets a revamp, but will it ever rival Facebook?

The battle for social networking supremacy has been one of stratospheric success stories and failures so horrific they should have come with an 18 rating.

From the early adopters like Friendster and MySpace to teen-focused domains like Bebo and through to the eventual domination of Facebook and, on a smaller scale, Twitter, it’s a bloody field scarred by misjudged corporate takeovers, inept strategies and buzzwords aplenty.

Google has been traditionally reluctant to enter the fray, placing its stock in the importance of search over social in its own rise to become the world’s most visited website. But since 2008 Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been trumpeting his website’s astronomical rise in user numbers, speeding from 100 million to 800 million in just three years. It’s the kind of success that a behemoth like Google cannot afford to ignore.

So it started experimenting with social, with scant success.

In May 2009 came Google Wave, a collaborative tool which the company saw as an evolution of the traditional email. When it failed to catch on it was offloaded to the Apache Software Foundation. Then came Google Buzz, a microblogging and messaging tool that was integrated into Gmail, Google’s popular email service. But it was met with a storm of criticism over its privacy flaws. Complaints ranged from the fact that abusive ex-boyfriends were automatically included in private communications, to the use of Buzz by governments like China and Iran to expose dissidents.

After two highly public failures, Google had to think very carefully about its next assault on the Facebook barricades.

It’s noticeable that Google+ has crept rather than galloped into the battlefield. Google’s latest and probably all-or-nothing attempt at social networking was launched in an invite-only testing phase in June this year. It quickly went viral in the tech communities, reaching 10 million users within a month. And recently Google’s idiosyncratic founder Larry Page revealed that the total user base has reached 40 million.

Much of this upsurge can be put down to the curiosity factor, but there are unique features which sets Google+ apart from its rivals. The most obvious is ‘Circles’, whereby you can curate your social network by dumping people (without them knowing, crucially) into the categories of Friends, Family or Acquaintances. Other innovations include ‘Hangouts’, which facilitates group video chat, and ‘Sparks’, which is essentially a way of saving searches on topics of personal interest.

Remember those failures we mentioned earlier? Google has shown that it doesn’t like to just discard its rubbish in the bin and has recycled Buzz into its new platform as ‘Chat’.

And from this week Wave also gets a new lease of life as part of a major overhaul of Google+. Now repackaged as ‘Ripple’, it gives a graphic overview of how content spreads through the network. The other additions in the latest revamp are a ‘what’s hot on Google+’ section and a ‘Creative Kit’ which allows simple picture editing.

In a recent Wired article, Google’s Bradley Horowitz insisted the web giant had learned some “visceral and hard-won” lessons from its past flirtations with social networking. The ongoing addition of improved functionality and new features, building on Google’s formidable search algorithms, proves that it is finally taking social seriously.

But the question of whether Google can ever mount a serious offensive against Facebook on the social battleground remains to be answered.

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