[BRIEF NOTE] On the utility of Google Plus

[rfmcdonald]

Claire Cain Miller's weekend New York Times article claiming that Google Plus meant more to Google as an identity service than as a social network competitive with Facebook caught the attention of many people.

Google Plus may not be much of a competitor to Facebook as a social network, but it is central to Google’s future — a lens that allows the company to peer more broadly into people’s digital life, and to gather an ever-richer trove of the personal information that advertisers covet. Some analysts even say that Google understands more about people’s social activity than Facebook does.

The reason is that once you sign up for Plus, it becomes your account for all Google products, from Gmail to YouTube to maps, so Google sees who you are and what you do across its services, even if you never once return to the social network itself.

Before Google released Plus, the company might not have known that you were the same person when you searched, watched videos and used maps. With a single Plus account, the company can build a database of your affinities.

Google says Plus has 540 million monthly active users, but almost half do not visit the social network.

“Google Plus gives you the opportunity to be yourself, and gives Google that common understanding of who you are,” said Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product management for Google Plus.

Plus is now so important to Google that the company requires people to sign up to use some Google services, like commenting on YouTube. The push is being done so forcefully that it has alienated some users and raised privacy and antitrust concerns, including at the Federal Trade Commission. Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, tied employee bonuses companywide to its success and appointed Vic Gundotra, a senior Google executive, to lead it.

The value of Plus has only increased in the last year, as search advertising, Google’s main source of profits, has slowed. At the same time, advertising based on the kind of information gleaned from what people talk about, do and share online, rather than simply what they search for, has become more important.

At one end, writing at Slate Lily Hay Newman argued that Google Plus isn't that significant a component in Google's decade-long effort to consolidate individuals' online data. And at the other, the New York Times shared the statements of loyal Google Plus users, many of whom found the network hosted more personally relevant content and was technologically innovative than Facebook. (Google Hangouts seem to feature.)

Me? I'm a Google Plus member, but I use it much less than I do Facebook. Simply put, the vast majority of the people I know and I'm likely to know are on Facebook. Spending time on a new network isn't that worthwhile. Perhaps more to the point, practically the only thing I use Google for is for its search and news-aggregation functions. I don't use Gmail, and the closure of Google Reader forced me to take my RSS habits away. Yahoo, between Flickr and Yahoo Mail and Tumblr, is something I use much more frequently.