Google+ Research

Google is offering vanity URLs for verified accounts such as football stars or car manufacturers. You just need to type in short URLs like “google.com/+davidbeckham” or “google.com/+toyota” to reach those pages.

The feature is not available widely for normal users yet. Google announced that they are introducing custom URLs to a limited number of verified profiles and pages, so we will have to wait for some time to clean our URLs.

Recently, Google has announced the a search-specific feature called Google+ Direct Connect. The feature gives visibility for Google Plus pages as the pages will show up when people type query in Google+ Search, for example, when people type in “+Toyota”, they will see the icon and link to the Google+ page of the brand.

Professional Milestone: 2 years later, I passed one million accounts "circling me" on Google Plus. Thank you! What has kept you coming back to Plus since you've joined? How could I be using it better?

Ed Rovera - 10:52 AM

G+ is like a Twitter feed without the silly 140-character limit and the dangerous compressed URLs. Plus, the "clientele" here seems to be more interesting; I learn far more from my time on G+ than I ever have on any other SM platform.

Alexander Howard - 11:07 AM

+Ed Rovera Glad you're enjoying the space! Personally, I enjoy the forced concision and precision of Twitter. It's made me a better writer, for one, and I can consume news and information at a high rate, for another. (I like RSS readers, too.) Your mileage may vary. :) http://twitter.com/digiphile

Ed Rovera - 2:46 PM

+Alexander Howard Twitter's 140-character limit may have made you a better writer but it seems to make a lot of people all but unintelligible. I prefer seeing more of what someone presents. I can easily scroll past what is not interesting at that moment or stop and enjoy the content. Twitter doesn't provide me enough to capture my interest. Plus, I have become rather jaded by the compressed URLs. The Iranian election Green Movement taught me that malware could be hidden in those compressed URLs so I stopped following trending topics on Twitter. Pretty soon, I was all but off Twitter completely. If I could find a good tool to cross-post G+ to Twitter, I might have a reason to go back, but...

And like +Tom Barnett I really find the people here more interesting. I admit that this is probably due in part to my being able to see more of what they want to provide, but the content is just more engaging on G+.

Is Google+ Ultimately Going to Overtake Facebook as #1 Social Network?

Given the huge lead that Google has in understanding mobile, in working on the next revolutionary product to replace the "iPhone" (Project Glass), in developing driverless cars that allow individuals to stay more connected to social networks, AND in creating the most highly successful profit model (targeted advertising) ever created in the history of business, what do you think?

Even with Facebook growing at 92% in e-commerce referral traffic over the year before, Google is so far ahead in this game and has plenty of time to continue the relentless growth of Google+ — despite all the naysayers who don't circle people here and therefore think Google+ is a ghost town.

Google+ is the most vibrant social network after one year of existence of any social network in history. Hang on: If you are building communities here, you are building the future of social engagement and business collaboration. My opinion, what's yours?

Many factors can come into play, of course. My shares on Google+ go out to 1.5 million followers, versus 250,000 on Twitter and 130,000 on Facebook. If I looked at sharing activity on my posts without taking those figures into consideration, it would be easy for me to sometimes think Facebook and Twitter are behind Google+. Of course, in plenty of cases, even with the smaller followers I have on the other services, I can see more resharing of what I post them.

Another issue is content. Stuff that’s positive about Google does much better on Google+ than things with negative connotations about the company. In contrast, I personally find that whether something is positive or negative about Facebook or Twitter has little impact on how it gets reshared. There’s less fanboyism with those services, in my view.

News of Fab.com’s raising $8M resulted in our biggest traffic day yet - more than 150,000 visitors the past 24 hours.

So, where did the traffic come from? See the picture here.

Check out #4. Google + at nearly 5% of traffic. Wowza.

The worst thing a social network can do is force growth, she said, pointing to Google’s work on Google+.

She pulled up a growth chart depicting the time it took for various services to reach 50 million users. Google+ took a stunning 88 days, versus 1,046 days for MySpace, for instance (shown here, chart credit goes to Leon Håland).

Adding user registrations at such a fast pace doesn’t leave enough time for a dedicated, engaged user community to organically create itself and establish norms, Fake argued.

“Being an incumbent, you can get seduced on this,” she said, pointing at the steep line for Google+. “It’s like getting high on your own supply.”

Fake added emphatically that the worst thing a start-up social network can do is to buy advertising to attract users. Growth should happen because users find value in a site, and then get their friends to join, she said.

And if users don’t come? Start-ups should try harder to make a better product.

To win, Google needs to focus on public perception beyond just building a platform. Google+ continues to integrate the social features with the newly updated homepage on Google.com and we should continue to see it span across their set of products now that they’ve consolidated their profiles which has caused privacy woes. Google knows they must make their social platform work, to meet the needs of the modern web, as advertising dollars shift to other social networks. They must not only double down on building a successful platform for users, brands and their business model, but must also do proactive media, press and influencer outreach.

For two months before Google+ opened to the public, the platform was accessible only to users with an invitation. Still, buzz around the nascent site helped it build a large audience of early adopters, and Google+ quickly ramped up to nearly 2 million unique visitors by the end of its third week. But as the data show, a steady decline set in just as quickly -- and user interest appeared to wane: After a strong start, the service lost visitors for six of the next nine weeks, dropping nearly 42% from its initial high in mid-July.

Then in late September, a similar pattern of rapid growth and stagnation began. When the service went public, Google+ experienced a huge spike, going from 1 million to 15 million visitors in a single week, again according to Hitwise.

But that didn't last. More than half of those users did not return the following week, and the network has since lost nearly 50% of the gains it had made since opening to the public.

Then, starting a couple of weeks ago, the site began to see a third, smaller bounce, with traffic rising 30% -- by about 1.5 million visitors -- since it launched initiatives to further open the network to businesses and professional users.

One thing I've been particularly obsessed with recently is the SEO elements of social profiles. It began with checking out the SEO for Facebook fan pages and then onto social content. Now, it's time to take a look at the differences between the optimization of your Google+ personal profile and the new Google+ Pages.

In the SmartBrief tradition of helping you figure out what really matters, here are what I consider to be the seven best Chrome Extensions on the market.

“Certainly, some products like Google search will support ‘incognito’ mode,” he tells me, outlining the three ways I could use any web product: unidentified, identified or pseudonymous.

“All three modes have different values to the user and different product implications,” says Horowitz. “Not every product will support all three modes. Something like Google Checkout is the highest bar, where financial processes are involved. And there’s a spectrum in between. Some products make sense to support in multiple modes, and it’s sort of a product-by-product decision.”

Ultimately, Horowitz says, the company’s goal is to give you the freedom to be who you want or need to be in any given moment.

Google+ emerged as the third largest site in the Social Network and Forums category last Wednesday, a day after the site went from “invitation-only” to "open access" available to everyone.

Opening access created a massive spike in market share of visits for the site, with a 1269% growth from the week ending September 17th to the week of September 24th. The site also received nearly 15 million total US visits last week.

Careful analysis of the Mosaic segments since launch; reveal that in just over six weeks, we’ve moved from innovators to early adopters to early mainstream users visiting the new social network.

Here’s a snapshot of top Mosaic types (by representation) that have been frequenting Google+.