Who believes that the fastest growing network in history - Plus

Bill Gross is the founder of Idealab's business incubator and CEO of Ubermedia , which recently fought Twitter to acquire the most popular client for this social network: TweetDeck. A man running around Twitter headquarters to be one of the first to gain access to the API and could not kill Twitter in the auction, who eventually bought the platform already mentioned, seems to have found another toy - Google+

It is in the “plus” that the largest social media players are starting to switch today, including Gross, who wrote this morning that this product could be, perhaps, the fastest growing social network in history, in principle, from the point of view of acceleration from zero to 1 million users. Of course, this is a sufficiently unfounded statement, but if you look deeply at the idea itself, it turns out that it is not so wrong.

Gross's “Prediction” also leads to the question of what businessmen are going to do, when Google finally makes the platform API available. Those who are familiar with the business around Ubermedia and Idealab know that these companies have been trying to develop a competitor to Twitter themselves for a very long time. It is possible that now, these plans may change slightly.

How to make friends and influence people

Currently, there are 15 networks whose audience is equal to or exceeds 100 million users. Will Plus be able to join this club faster than anyone else? Quite possible.
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Facebook - 750 million
Tencent QQ - 636 million
Qzone - 480 million
Netease - 360 million
Windows Live Messenger - 330+ million
Habbo - 203 million
Twitter - 200 million
Gmail - 193.3 million
Skype - 145 million
Sina Weibo - 140+ million
Vkontakte - 135+ million
Orkut - 120+ million
Bebo - 117 million
Badoo - 113+ million
LinkedIn - 100+ Millions

After viewing this list, you probably caught fire on a light bulb overhead, symbolizing another question: “Why can another hundred million network become a threat to Facebook if the other 14 did not become them?” The answer is probably that Plus (unlike most competitors in this market) will not stop at around 100 million users. According to ComScore, Google has become the first company in history whose page is seen by more than 1 billion users (if that is the seventh part of the world's population, where there are still many areas that will never be connected to the network at all).

And this fact definitely suggests that Google can and will pump Plus users up to a critical point. Bill Gross says this: “I predict that Google Plus will grow from 0 to 100,000,000 users faster than any other Internet service in history.”

This phrase, written by a man who, in general, well versed in the situation, gives hope. It is also important to understand that in order to become a winner, Plus, you do not need to win against Facebook or Twitter. David Kirkpatrick last weekend wrote that it is unlikely that people developing Plus hope to get an audience bigger than Facebook has — in a sense, the current 750 million users of the latter are a critical mass of social network users in principle . Google is aiming at something else - to become a prominent player in the market, to make the platform accessible to third-party developments, to become popular in circles not only geeks (and so far there are most in Plus), but also in the corporate environment, among families divided by continents. The real goal of Google Plus, as many believe, is not to kill Facebook, but to make it open.

This goal can be considered even more serious on the scale of the entire global network, since today Facebook concentrates all the content in itself, and Google really wants the users to "openly" share it, as the company whose main product is search. If Plus's efforts are not in vain, then every day, an increasing number of users will want to write to any social networks, from anywhere, using any interface or platform, client. In the good old times, it was impossible to call a subscriber of a telephone network different from yours (this is unfamiliar to people in Russia, since everything developed centrally - by the state, and not by private business). Exactly the same situation is happening today in the field of social media, but if Plus can reach a sufficient audience, it can break up this attitude.

Of course, the most important word here is the notorious " if ." Almost everyone who has tried Plus says that he is quite ... fascinating, if properly prepared. Will it be just as entertaining for the mass market? In my opinion, not yet, the product needs to go through several stages and finally give the API to the developers in order to make Plus really “open”, as Google loves it.

But everything can change. “I can’t wait to see what social networks will bring next year,” writes Bill Gross. Already in the autumn, during the seasonal increase in business activity, we will observe amusing dances between the key players of this market, and all eyes will be fixed on the main pair.

ReadWriteWeb via Huffington