On Tuesday, Google unveiled its highly anticipated new social network, Google+. (Watch an introduction here.) This product follows two disastrous social networking attempts: Google Buzz, which provoked several privacy-related lawsuits, and Google Wave, an image and media sharing service launched in 2009 and killed within a year. Can Google+, which organizes friends into "Circles" (like "The Fam," "Work People," and "Epic Bros") for micro-targeted sharing, possibly compete with Facebook?
No way. Facebook is too dominant: Google+ "has a snowball's chance in hell against a service with 750 million users," says Adam Turner at The Sydney Morning Herald. Everyone's on Facebook, so it seems unlikely that people would want to switch to Google+. Sure, Facebook has privacy issues, and it's not easy to manage settings to avoid oversharing with certain people. Google+'s simpler privacy defaults and targeted sharing capabilities are assets, but hardly enough to promise success.
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