Who believes the fastest growing network in history - Plus

Bill Gross is the founder of the Idealab business incubator and CEO of Ubermedia , who recently fought with Twitter for acquiring the most popular client for this social network: TweetDeck. A person who ran around Twitter headquarters in order to be one of the first to gain access to the API and was unable to interrupt Twitter in the auction, as a result of buying the platform already mentioned, seems to have found another toy for himself - Google+

It’s the “plus” that they are starting to switch today major social media players, including Gross, who wrote this morning aboutthat this product may become perhaps the fastest growing social network in history in principle, in terms of accelerating from zero to 1 million users. Of course, this is a sufficient unfounded statement, but if you look deeper into the idea itself, it turns out that it is not so wrong.

Gross's “Prediction” also begs the question of what type of businessmen are going to do when Google finally makes the platform API available. Those who are familiar with the business around Ubermedia and Idealab know that these companies have long been trying to develop a competitor for the same Twitter. It is possible that now, these plans may change slightly.

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Currently, there are 15 networks whose audience is equal to or exceeds 100 million users. Can Plus join this club faster than everyone else? Quite possible.

Facebook - 750 million
Tencent QQ - 636 million
Qzone - 480 million
Netease - 360 million
Windows Live Messenger - 330+ million
Habbo - 203 million
Twitter - 200 million
Gmail - 193.3 million
Skype - 145 million
Sina Weibo - 140+ million
Vkontakte - 135+ million
Orkut - 120+ million
Bebo - 117 million
Badoo - 113+ million
LinkedIn - 100+ million

After looking at this list, you probably got a light above your head, symbolizing another question: “Why is another one hundred millionth network a threat to Facebook if the other 14 haven’t?” The answer probably lies in the fact that Plus (unlike most competitors in this market) will not stop at around 100 million users. According to ComScore, Google was the first company in history to have a page with more than 1 billion users (if anything, a seventh of the world's population, where there are still many areas that will never be connected to the network).

And this fact definitely suggests that Google can and will pump Plus users to a critical point. Here's what Bill Gross says about this: "I predict that Google Plus will grow from 0 to 100 million users faster than any other Internet service in history."

This phrase, written by a man who, in general, is well versed in the situation, inspires hope. It is also important to understand that in order to become a winnerPlus, you don’t have to beat Facebook or Twitter. Last weekend, David Kirkpatrick wrote that it’s unlikely that people developing Plus are hoping to get a larger audience than Facebook’s - in a sense, the current 750 million users of the latter represent a critical mass of social network users in principle . Google aims at something else - to become a prominent player in the market, to make the platform accessible to third-party developments, to become popular not only among geeks (and so far such a majority in Plus), but also in the corporate environment, among families divided by continents. The real goal of Google Plus, according to many, is not to kill Facebook, but to make it open.

This goal can be considered even more serious throughout the global network, since today Facebook concentrates all the content in itself, and Google really wants users to “openly” share it, as the company whose main product is search. If Plus’s efforts are not in vain, then every day, an increasing number of users will want to write to any social networks, from anywhere, using any interface or platform, client. In the good old days, it was impossible to call a subscriber of a telephone network other than yours (this is unfamiliar to the inhabitants of Russia, since everything developed centrally - by the state, and not by private business). Exactly the same situation is happening today in the field of social media, but if Plus can get a sufficient audience, it can also ruin this foundation.

Of course, the most important word here is the notorious " if ." Almost everyone who tried Plus says that it’s enough ... fun if cooked properly. Will it be as exciting for the mass market? In my opinion, not yet, the product needs to go through several stages and finally give the API to the developers in order to make Plus really “open”, like Google likes.

But, everything can change. “I can't wait to see what the next year will bring to social networks,” writes Bill Gross. Already in the fall, during a period of seasonal increase in business activity, we will observe funny dances between the key players in this market, and all eyes will be focused on the main couple.

ReadWriteWeb via Huffington