(L-R) Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google Inc., versus Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. (Photos: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty and Justin Sullivan/Getty)
Google’s senior vice-president of engineering Vic Gundotra introduced his company’s latest social networking platform project Google Plus On June 28, 2011.
Within four weeks became the fastest social site to reach 25 million users.
The unveiling of Google Plus has been overwhelmingly framed as a direct challenge to Facebook, a struggle for a share of its 750 million users and almost $2 billion in annual advertising revenue.
Bottom line: Google is still the Internet's leading brand in terms of number of users. Facebook has an enormous base of regular users who spend a considerable amount of time on its site -- much more time than on Google. However, Facebook's users were not particularly happy with their experience last year. It will be interesting to see whether Facebook's customer satisfaction scores come in higher in this year's ACSI.
A recent survey of more than 2,000 app developers reported that two-thirds think Google Plus will “catch up” to Facebook, saying that with assets such as search, Maps and YouTube, the company “trumps Facebook’s social graph lead,” and 49% think Google “shows more innovation than Facebook.”
Conclusion
Many other factors will come into play to determine whether Google+ can successfully challenge Facebook in the social media arena, including the appeal of the new service and whether people are willing to leave an established network where they already have numerous connections.
Google is well positioned as an Internet brand with better customer satisfaction than Facebook, and is a larger company with more internal resources. However, Facebook is a high-growth company that's likely on the verge of a public stock offering, meaning it has access both to a great deal of investor cash and top-flight employees hoping to cash in on that growth.
