Google will further boost Google+ – Le Figaro

The Social Network, launched in 2011 to compete with Facebook, connects the processors, but still struggling to find its audience.

Google+ remember our good memories. Google announced Tuesday on his blog that his social network, launched in 2011, would be revived in a new form. The objective of this operation is to revitalize this platform that never really found its audience.

Eddie Kessler, director of flows at Google explains in this article that the company decided to focus on two elements particularly popular with users: communities and collections. The communities were created in 2012 and aimed to bring together users who had common interest, a bit like groups that can be found on Facebook. According to figures by al firm lle welcome 1.2 million people daily. The collections feature added in May 2015, allowing users to group and categorize their publications by topic. It is possible to sort out what we want to see a particular contact or even subscribe to a particular collection.

A progressive dismemberment of the social network

In July, Google had already informed about the new direction taken by its social network and its desire to focus on the interests of its users. Many fonctionnaltiés present to the origins of the service were well separated from the entity. Google+ Photos had paid the price, this part of the social network then having been moved to a separate application, Google Photos.

Google+, supposedly from a competitor to Facebook and Twitter, has become over time a simple social overlay that links all services of the company, be it Gmail, YouTube or even Maps . The notification icon that looks like a small bell appears at the top right as soon as it is connected with their Google Account. Until last July, comments that a user was posting on YouTube video sharing platform appeared on his Google+ profile. This is no longer the case.

Despite a good initial ambition, Google+ has encountered many problems, already in-house. In April 2014, Vic Godutra, its creator, left Google. According to Techcrunch, many tensions existed between the team in charge of the social network and its leader. The specialized site explained, citing internal sources, that Google+ was promised a fate of “living death-”. Since leaving Godutra, two people have succeeded at the head of the social network.

A number of active users probably very low

The other issue for Google+ is the number of its users. Officially, consider 2.5 billion, almost double of Facebook, thanks to the many gateways created between the social network and the various Google services. But the platform itself of little interest to users. In an article relayed by the American press earlier this year, a blogger estimated that only 9% of Google+ users had published something there in January. In 37% of cases, their most recent activity was the publication of a review on YouTube. Excluding this last activity, the blogger estimated 6.6 million people the real number of active users on Google +.

Google had attempted a first foray into the social networking market in 2004 with Orkut . Popular in Brazil, however, it was closed in July 2014 because too inefficient in the United States where he could not catch up MySpace. The company had announced to want precisely to focus on Google+.