In the past few months, I have read many articles on Google’s new innovation, Google plus. Apparently, with Google plus, you can connect with friends, share photos, stories, and other nonsense about yourself, that nobody cares about, except you, your wife (if you have one), and your mother (if she uses a PC). Sharing photos and stories about yourself? Now where have I heard this before? Isn’t this similar to Facebook? In fact, isn’t this just a Facebook clone?

It actually is. Apparently, Google is determined to create a competition for Facebook no matter what, and they think that by offering “Angry Birds” and other useless games on their platform they will undermine Facebook’s efforts to rule the Internet and become the world’s most visited website. Not only that, someone at Google (Larry Page, maybe?) seriously thinks that Google Plus is a decent competition to Facebook (or maybe is a Facebook replacement). Apparently, no one at Google wants to face the harsh truth: Google lost the battle of Social Networks, and Facebook is here to stay (well, unless Google buys it for something like a $100 billion dollars – the same ransom amount that the world had to pay Dr. Evil to stop him from taking over – or destroying – the world).

Now I haven’t used Google Plus before (and neither did any of my friends, well some of my not very close friends have used it, but only for experimentation), and I don’t expect to ever use it. The thing is Google claims to currently have 30 million users (or even more). Well, guess what, these are the gmail users, or the users with a Google account. I have taken a look at Google Plus myself (went to the homepage), and I didn’t know what Google wanted, or what is this at first glance, and I consider myself to have a decent technical background. Well, apparently I don’t!

Here’s how I think Google Plus has already failed:

– Google Plus seems to have been developed by a very young geek. It doesn’t look professional, and yet it’s very complicated.
– The only chance that for Google Plus to survive is to steal Facebook users, for good, and I don’t see this happening, at least in the next 5 years (I suspect Google will drop this stupid idea in a year from now)
– Google Plus is hailed by many solid Internet resources, the same ones that hailed Google wave and Google Buzz (both are now dead projects – the former was supposedly created to compete with Facebook and the latter with Twitter).
– A solid evidence proving that Google Plus has failed is by looking at the social activity of any post, for example, this is the social activity of an article on Bloomberg:

– Although Google is trying very hard to promote it by adding the +1 (an identical clone of Facebook’s like feature) next to each search result (or even advertisement), I suspect that all these +1s will only attract spammers, rather than real people.

I think the best thing to lure people into using Google Plus is to pay them money to migrate from Facebook (and maybe pay them extra for every friend they convince into migrating to Google plus). And even then, they will take the money and just go back to using Facebook.

I wish that Google can listen to all its investors: “stick to enhancing your search algorithm, do something innovative in the search area, and stop obsessing with Facebook and cloning other websites, it didn’t work before, it won’t work now, and it won’t work in the future”.