Google Plus – Facebook’s new rival

Last month, Google launched Google+ which is pretty much their attempt to jump onto the social media bandwagon. Before we jump into the stats from Hitwise, lets have a quick recap of What is Google+?

google vs facebook
(source: thenextweb.com/google/2010/11/10/google-vs-facebook)

Google+ brings all your contacts in one place, and lets you organise them into different groups. You can have a group for your work friends, school friends and so on. Google+ is made of five key areas:

* Circles — your friends hub. Instead of grouping everyone together as your “friend,” you can create different circles for the different types of people in your life like colleagues, relatives, tennis partners. It is very easy to make new groups and add contacts – drag and drop.
* Hangouts — this is where you can send a broadcast to your friends that you are online and want to chat face to face. You have everyone “hanging out” together – only virtually though. It is like a massive three, four way skype chat.
* Sparks — Designate your interests in Sparks, and Google+ will collect articles, videos, and photos of the things you love from around the web to read when you’re free (like an RSS reader). You can share these items with specific circles of friends instead of all of your friends.
* Instant Upload — With Instant Upload, your mobile photos and videos are automatically uploaded to the web. (So no worrying about backing up your media, you can have it stored online in your own cloud)
* Huddle — A group messaging system, Huddle allows you to chat with a number of friends on the go via your mobile phone.

So do you think Google+ will take off? Only time will tell. Hitwise have come up with the following interesting stats, so it looks like people are using it. I doubt they will give up on Facebook, so the battle between to the two search giants will continue.

– Google+ received more than 1.79M total visits the week ending July 23, 2011. That is a decrease of 3% vs. the previous week (July 16th). The site received 1.86M total visits the previous week
– The average time spent on the site was down as well by 10% from 5minutes and 50seconds to 5minutes and 15seconds
– Among the top 50 Upstream sites, 59% of Upstream traffic to Google+ last week came from other Google properties. Google.com accounted for 37% of Upstream traffic to the site. Gmail accounted 15.59%, a 9% increase from previous week
– 40% of Upstream traffic to Google+ last week came from Search Engines (8% increase). Email provided the 2nd largest amount of Upstream traffic accounting for 19%.
– 59% of visits to Google+ are from Males.
– Among age demos, 33% of visits are from users age 25-34 for the 4 weeks ending July 23rd.

I have yet to really engage with Google+. At the beginning, only those with invitations could use Google+ but now everyone has an invite.

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