http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2013/01/26/watch-out-facebook-with-google-at-2-and-youtube-at-3-google-inc-could-catch-up/
Watch Out Facebook, With Google+ at #2 and YouTube at #3, Google, Inc. Could Catch Up A report by UK market research firm Trendstream updated its Global Web Index this week which showed how well Google‘s strategy is working in terms of getting users engaged in its social networks. According to GWI, Google+ is now the second largest social network in terms of active users and YouTube, included for the first time in its index is now third. The report estimates Facebook‘s active users in December 2012 at 693 million, compared to 343 million for Google+. The post does not break out the number of YouTube active users, but from the chart it appears to be approximately 280 million. There is obviously significant overlap between Google+ and YouTube in terms of users, so those two numbers cannot merely be added up to say the Google, Inc. is only 70 million active users behind Facebook, but if all active YouTube users become active Google+ users (something not so difficult for Google to engineer) it would likely add a significant amount to those 343 million. But Google+ is a ghost town, right? Well, undoubtably Facebook’s active users are more active than Google+’s (I haven’t seen any stats on this yet), but all active user counts are suspect, Facebook’s included. Every action that you take logged in as a social network’s user can make you an “active user.” Facebook has made its accounts a virtual single sign-in for a a big chunk of the web, and Google is catching up, particularly when it changed its account system last year to merge all of its products, YouTube and Docs included, into singular accounts. But there is an important way that these active user numbers do matter, even if they don’t conform to our intuitive ideas about what it means to be an active user. The actions that we do on the web are trackable based on what accounts we are logged in to—and we are often logged in to several services simultaneously. The future of search, and all of the personalization that can be served up by that search data, is bound up in how much and what kinds of data can be associated with each of our different accounts. In another post from Trendstream, Google is compared to Facebook’s new Graph Search. Its data indicate a marked decline in the percent of Facebook users who are actively sharing information about their daily lives—a significant source of data for Graph Search. GWI observes that, “Growth of active usage is concentrated in passive or frictionless sharing actions and behaviours, like “purchasing a product or service” or watching a TV show or film, which have grown massively through 2012.” The post concludes that, “The future of social is far more passive, less about interacting with friends and more about watching or utilizing the social data to navigate and discover the web as well as the world around us. This means the data will not be user contributed but, aggregated about the user. This leaves Google with the upper hand (italics mine).” In terms of Facebook’s Graph Search, Trendstream’s Tom Smith writes, “It is far easier to lay social and personalised data over a search product that aggregates the entire internet and links that to users. Facebook is only aggregating what exists in the Facebook eco-system or what consumers have opted into share. To bring this data, which will be coming from Facebook’s partnership with Bing, into the Facebook’s Graph Search will be a far bigger technology challenge and most crucially, an immense privacy challenge.” The other thing boosting Google+’s active user count is the way that people are being made aware of its value in a business context. Google has added pop-up labels that help to identify people in your company as you post updates, for example. But, beyond these mechanical features, Google has promised that Google+ profiles will factor more in search rankings over time, so more and more people are beginning to pay attention and at least fill out their profiles and link them to their content so as not to miss out. So the way that Google has wired together all of its products and used those interconnections to boost “active usage,” is indeed relevant, because it indicates the density of data it can collect about its users. Active usage, in this sense, is really “passive usage,” in that users are not always aware of the fact that they are interacting with Google’s social network when they do things on YouTube, for instance. But if the future of all of these services is in passive collection, and Google+ can capture a lot of this activity, it will succeed at becoming less of a ghost town. Facebook will retain the edge as being the social network people are aware of even as Google makes inroads with social networks that collect more usable data. When it comes to social media, what does it mean to be active, anyway? – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – To keep up with Quantum of Content, please subscribe to my updates on Facebook, follow me on Twitter or add me on Google+. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Unique Geek" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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