How the company plans to lure users of the world's largest social network

Recently, several important news related to Google have appeared. Research company Comscore reported that more than 1 billion people visited Google sites in May, or about half of all Internet users on Earth. No Internet company in the entire history of measurements has yet been able to boast of such an achievement. And a couple of days later it became known that the US Federal Trade Commission was launching an antitrust investigation into Google. The subject of the commission's study will be Google's possible abuse of its dominant position in the search market in America. The investigation, according to Wall Street Journal commentators who dug up the story, can be comparable in resonance to the famous Microsoft case of the late 1990s, which almost ended in the division of the company.

As consumers and regulators tried to comprehend—some with admiration, others with horror—just how big Google had become, the company unveiled its new project, Google+. The project is in testing for a limited number of users, but it is the most ambitious attempt to date to enter the Facebook-dominated market. The project was developed for almost a year in an atmosphere of secrecy unusual for Google and, as the company hopes, will be able to break the “social” curse of Google, which has not yet been able to create a single truly successful social service. How important success in this area is for the company is evidenced by the fact that one of the first orders of Larry Page, who returned to the post of Google CEO in April, was the creation of the position of vice president of social services. This post was taken by Vic Gundotra, who is responsible for the Google+ project.

Google+ includes several social services that make it almost a full-fledged social network. The most important of them is called circles. With it, Google seems to be hoping to solve a problem that's increasingly plaguing Facebook: Many people don't want to share all their information with everyone they know online. Circles lets you divide your contacts into groups like colleagues, family, and classmates by dragging people into one circle or another. This way, users don't have to decide whether photos or locations can be shared publicly; sensitive work or personal information is only visible to people in a certain circle.

In addition to the news feed that is typical for a social network, Google+ has a parallel stream of information called Sparks. Each spark is one of the user's interests. Based on your interests, Google fills the stream with relevant content that differs from the search results. The company hopes that its experience in selecting important and interesting information will give a competitive advantage or simply make reading the feed interesting for users.

In addition, Google allows you to instantly upload photos and share them with members of certain circles (Instant Upload) and exchange messages with several people at once (Huddle). These two services are primarily aimed at mobile device users and, therefore, take advantage of another competitive advantage of Google - the world's most widely used mobile OS, Android. The other day, Android director Andy Rubin wrote on Twitter that every day the number of OS users is growing by 500,000 people. Finally, Google+ has a built-in service called Hangout (meeting place), a video chat that randomly suggests people to chat with.

The Google+ feature set leaves no doubt that no matter what the new service is called, it means a full-fledged social network, moreover, aimed at any consumer, and not just loyal Google users. This is also indicated by the fact that the company’s usual lapidary, almost “absent” design was replaced by carefully thought-out icons, and the interface was simplified to the limit. The work was entrusted to designer Andy Hertzfeld, a software developer for Macintosh computers in the early 1980s. Soon, the creators promise, Google+ will become available to iPhone users.

No matter how convincing Google+ may be, it's going to have a tough time. Both because the company really does not have a positive “social” experience, and because it will have to compete with Facebook. According to a source close to Facebook , the network has 750 million unique visitors per month, and when it comes to communication, quantity automatically translates into quality. Moreover, even at the beginning of its journey, Facebook had a very effective growth strategy - from campus to campus. Google+ is starting from scratch and even the main advantage - the operating system - is forced to share with a competitor: Facebook is also present as an application in Android. Another advantage of Facebook is its hundreds of thousands of applications, many of which have their own audience of tens of millions of people.

Google has taken its "social" responsibilities seriously, but there is no indication that the company will be able to capture a significant share of the social networking market in the near future. Unless, of course, the US Federal Trade Commission wants to develop competition in this area as well.

Google created a Facebook competitor