Why Google+ can become much more than just another social network

Unless you’ve been on an month-long expedition to the deepest, darkness regions of the Amazon where contact with the rest of civilization is all but impossible, chances are you’ve already been exposed to the massive wall of hype that has surrounded the launch of Google’s social networking portal, Google+.

You’ve probably already acquired your Google+ account, if the astonishingly high sign-up rate is anything to go by. 20 million users was the last milestone we saw.

So far, the reaction has been mostly positive. Users seem to appreciate Google+’s fusion of the best bits from Twitter and Facebook, and the notion of categorising your friends in ‘circles’ seems to have struck a chord with those who have been bitten once too often by sharing information with the wrong people on other social networking sites.

Of course, in this day and age having a decent online portal is only one part of the puzzle. Facebook and Twitter’s meteoric growth has a lot to do with the support of excellent mobile phone applications across iOS, Android and BlackBerry OS and this is something that will be vital to Google+’s long-term prospects, too.

Google obviously knows this, as the company has quickly pushed out Android and iOS Google+ apps. Both flavours offer the ability to post items to your account, upload photos, view what your friends are posting and much more. When you consider the Google+ mobile app on both platforms has plenty of time to develop and improve, it’s certainly not a bad first effort.

On paper at least, Google+ has got off to a storming start. But there’s always that nagging doubt it could just be one social network too many and few are likely to drop their massive list of contacts on Twitter and Facebook just to start the process all over again with Google+.

It’s therefore tempting to write the service off as another Google Wave - a positive but ultimately short-lived experiment that proves Google should stick to what it does best, rather than dabble in the waters traditionally patrolled by Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

However, such a view misses the point of Google+. As many of its supporters have taken great efforts to point out, Google+ isn’t just about social networking - it goes way, way beyond that.

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