This week, Mashable gets its readers to vote for their favourite social media platform. Just one day after the poll was created, more than 9,000 votes were cast.
At the time of this post, Google+ runs ahead of the pack with almost 40% of total votes.
Mashable Poll as at August 8 2011
However, it is important to note that this poll is limited in that the average readers of Mashable are made up of the digerati, and thus reflect the views of the cyber elite, not the ordinary social media user. That said, is Google+ targeted at the average social media user?
Various articles and reviews of Google+ have consistently praised the platform’s privacy features as top-notch, but too complicated for mainstream users to grasp. When people share something with Google+, they are going to constantly find themselves asking, “Who is that going to?”
“Google+ is going to be like a third-semester Calculus class for many people.” – David Beckemeyer
Iddo identifies Google+’s compartmentalized communication as an attempt at emulating real-life correspondence. This classification by circles initially makes sense because it is what our social life is supposedly like. But to emulate real-life relations, there is a constant need to perform dynamically complex intersections and deletions between those circles.
“Few, if any, would care to be bothered tweaking this on a social network for each and every post.” – Iddo
There is something that Facebook and Twitter excel at – making hard things simple. For Google+ to truly win this social media war, it has to appeal to the mainstream, and the mainstream likes simplicity.
“The irony is that Google’s biggest product, its search page, is a classic of simple design. But everything else it does becomes too complicated.” – Arthur
