5 Things To Watch With Google+ Games
August 15, 2011 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
When Google released its third party game platform on Google+ last Thursday, it was its first major expansion of the service. With 25 million users, Google+ is still much smaller than Facebook and has few of the features that Facebook now does with its latest upgrade. But the platform for games–and other third-party applications–is a step in making Google+ a legitimate social network to compete with Facebook.
The Google platform also gives a first real social gaming alternative to Facbeook. After the Google+ launch, there are a number of areas worth watching, since Google+ is a key part of Google’s overall strategy.
Will Games Get Viral Growth On Google+?
Facebook games such as Zynga’s FarmVille originally grew to massive scale with the ability for developers to send large numbers of email invites and post game notifications in the Facebook News Feed. Facebook later clamped down on these viral notifications.
In Google+, however, people only see game notifications when they click on the games tab. And sharing on Google+ is more granular with Google Circles, which makes it less simple to share achievements across your Circles. On Facebook games, you just click to share with friends after you reach a new level or achievement. With Google you have to select which group of friends you want to share with. In one feature to boost growth, while you’re playing a Google+ game, there is a strip below the game with your friends where you can click to invite them to play. Developers like to see their “K-factor”–a term borrowed from epidemiology–above 1.0, meaning that more than one user was added as a friend of each existing user. That means the app is growing exponentially.
Will Google add other features to boost game distribution? Facebook has just launched major additions to its platform that include a real-time ticker of friends’ achievements in games that place the Facebook platform ahead in terms of features.
The growth of Google+ games and the platform itself are tied together. The growth of games depends on the wider adoption of Google+. And a successful games platform will draw more people to Google+. In a potentially positive sign for Google, an Experian Hitwise study found that Google+ is growing among the baby boomer or “Kids and Cabernet” set. “(I)n just over six weeks, we’ve moved from innovators to early adopters to early mainstream users visiting the new social network,” Hitwise says.
