Google+: The Right Service At the Right Time

I don’t turn into a fanboy very often, but for Google+ I’ll make an exception.

There are plenty of bugs, frustrations, and annoyances, but if Google opens up the plumbing and lets developers work with a sufficiently advanced API — at this point, all indications point in that direction — Google+ has the potential to turn ubiquitous. Google has a long history of creating and cooperating with Web standards efforts — its OpenSocial API is a good example — so hopes are high. Developers can sign up to get notifications about emerging details.

Edd Dumbill, posting on the O’Reilly Radar blog, calls Google+ the start of a commodity social layer, and he’s hit the nail on the head: “Google+ is the rapidly growing seed of a Web-wide social backbone, and the catalyst for the ultimate uniting of the social graph. All it will take on Google’s part is a step of openness to bring about such a commoditization of the social layer.”

The infrastructure’s moving in and the response has been phenomenal. Yesterday, in my article that explained how Google’s sweetening the pot for prospective Google Apps subscribers, I wrote that the number of people signed up for Google+ might have hit 20 million. Late last night, Google+ afficionado Paul Allen (no, not the Microsoft Paul Allen) reported that, by his reckoning, Google+ stood at 18 million users.

Paul uses a strange technique for estimating the total number of registered users, which relies on counting the number of American Google+ users with specific last names, then extrapolating for the total worldwide. Vincenzo Lombino, using a completely different estimation technique that includes such imponderables as the number of Mark Zuckerberg followers on Google+, came up with 20 million this morning.

That compares to Google’s announcement that “more than 10 million” people had signed up as of last Tuesday. Yes, the number of registered Google+ users has just about doubled in the past eight days.

The 2-million-new-users-per-day pace has fallen back a little bit. As Allen puts it, “the last four days have averaged only 948,000 new users, and yesterday the site added only 763,000. Yesterday’s growth of 4.47 percent was the slowest viral growth since Google opened up invites back on July 6.” Hold your breath for a second. He’s saying that 4.47 percent growth in one day is the slowest day-to-day increase ever.

If your company has a social networking strategy for customers, there’s a new player in town and it would behoove you to come up to speed quickly. If you use social networking internally, with a locked-down product like Lync Server, you’re going to hear a lot of grumbling from the troops about the freedom afforded by Google+. And if your company is still trying to put a cap on Facebook, the toothpaste is about to squeeze out of the tube — in a different direction.

Many of the old anti-social-networking arguments that apply to Facebook don’t carry over to Google+. There’s far greater control over who can see what and when. Couple that with fewer security concerns — or at least security concerns that crop up in quite different scenarios — and your users are going to have a lot of credible arguments for going social with a corporate blessing.

Google+ has been out for two weeks, and it’s starting to look like Google hit one out of the park.

This story, “Google+: The right service at the right time,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.

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In Facebook’s Wake, Two Social Networks Tie the Knot

By Shira Ovide

In Facebook’s shadow, two smaller social networks have signed up to “like”each other.

Quepasa Corp., the owner of an eponymous social network with about 38 million registered users, said it is buying fellow social network myYearbook.com in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $100 million.

Quepasa launched during the dotcom boom, nearly went bust and now has refashioned itself as a social network aimed at Latinos with footholds in Brazil and Mexico. MyYearbook was started by teenage siblings in 2005, and sought to poach people from the dominant social network of the time: MySpace.

Today, the companies aren’t predicting they’ll unseat Facebook, the current king of social networking.

The CEOs of Quepasa and myYearbook said the combined company can be a success even at a fraction of Facebook’s size. Quepasa and myYearbook together have more than 70 million registered users. Facebook has 750 million active users. Quepasa and myYearbook say their combined revenue for the last 12 months was $33.6 million. Facebook reportedly pulled in $2 billion in revenue last year.

The deal also is a big bite for Quepasa, which has a market value of $115 million. Its stock price has fallen 41% this year. About $82 million of the myYearbook acquisition price is in Quepasa stock, the companies said. They plan to announce their merger later Wednesday.

Quepasa and myYearbook said they focus on linking up people who don’t know each other in real life, but share common interests or live near each other. They say Facebook is more useful to keep tabs on what your real-life friends are doing.

Quepasa and myYearbook “are about meeting people you don’t know but should,” said Geoff Cook, the CEO of myYearbook and its original investor. He also said the two companies combined will better be able to promote their videogames to each company’s Web and mobile users.

Both companies have a rich history, at least by the standards of the young social networking industry.

Quepasa started out as a Spanish-language Web portal and search engine in the late 1990s. First came an IPO and a pricey promotional campaign featuring Cuban-American singer Gloria Estefan. By 2000, Quepasa sold its furniture and computing equipment, and stopped running its website to save money. After a 2002 takeover by Quepasa’s original founder, the company rebuilt itself as a social network and hub for playing online videogames.

Catherine and David Cook, teenage siblings from New Jersey, started MyYearbook in 2005 to connect high school students on the Web. The siblings’ older brother, the current myYearbook CEO Geoff Cook, agreed to invest in the venture. The same year myYearbook was getting off the ground, Mark Zuckerberg shortened the name of his startup from “TheFacebook.com.”

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