What Does The Future Hold For Google+

Google+ publicly launched last year with a great expectation of, not necessarily what it was, but what it could become under the right guidance.  Google users and customers alike had both high expectations and expected there to be a high probability of success for Google+ to, at least, become one of the major players in the social network market.

Facebook and other large, well established social networks, were worried and rightly so.  A company the size of Google could give anyone a run for their money – and with the benefits of integrating into all the other Google services and the success of most products and services released by Google, the future looked promising.

Unfortunately, as we come up to nearly a year after the public release, there has been little or dare I say no progress.  Many basic errors that have been widely reported on Google Groups have been ignored in the main.  Even the ones that have been public acknowledged by Google Developers remain unsolved.

Leaving this to one side a second, the woeful lack of features and functionality present in Google+ is shocking.  The complete, “comprehensive” API has seven functions.  Yes, thats right, 7 functions.  When compared with the leading social network Facebook, which has hundreds of functions, you can see why developers might have a problem with creating anything worthwhile on Google+.

The surprising thing is, that Google is based on the popular OpenSocial API (of which Google is a major player in the development and maintenance of).  OpenSocial has much more functionality than Google+, which barely scrapes the surface.

At present, there is no way of sending information to or posting information to the Google+ network.  And you can only retrieve extremely basic public information back from it.  Basically, it kills the idea of integrating any third party app with a social network.

As it stands, Google+ is currently a glorified status machine and a html page loader for flash applications.  In short, it is going nowhere fast, which is a huge disappointment.

Google really need to step up a gear with Google+ as, if it continues for another year, as it has done during its first year, it’s likely to die out and lose the few regular users it currently has.

Google has the tools and resources and Google+ has the potential.  However currently, none of these are being used to make Google+ become a viable alternative to social networks such as Facebook.