feb 28, 2012 - The Mounting Minuses at Google+

Description:

"Nobody wants another social network right now," said Brian Solis, an analyst at social-media advisory firm Altimeter Group. For those who already use Facebook, "Google hasn't communicated what the value of Google+ is," he said.

Google executives downplay the direct comparison to Facebook, which has 845 million monthly active users. They have repeatedly said they are making a long-term bet on the initiative, and the company has yet to build up some of the weapons that made Facebook successful, including encouraging app development.

In an interview, Bradley Horowitz, a Google vice president of product management, said Google+ is designed to be more than a destination site and, as a result, is "extremely hard for any third party to measure." Rather, he said, Google+ acts as an auxiliary to Google services—such as Gmail and YouTube—by adding a "personal" social-networking layer on top of them.

For example, Google+ members who search on Google.com can now get personal results that include content from Google+.

Mr. Horowitz declined to share data about how much time people spend on Google+ but said "we're growing by every metric we care about." A Google spokeswoman said comScore's data is "dramatically lower" than Google's internal data.