For a brief moment it looked like the social not-working site Facebook was about to get a serious caning by Google+.
Not only was traffic at Google+ surging, users were starting to say how much they hated Facebook for what it was doing with their data and moving over.
However, Experian Hitwise released a report that supports a slowdown in usage of the Google+ network.
The beancounters found that total Google+ visits fell by three percent during the week of July 23. Before this, there was a traffic increase of 283 percent with more than 1.86 million visits.
Google+ members spent 10 percent less time on the site. Specifically, users spent about 5 minutes, 15 seconds on the site during the July 23 week compared to nearly 6 minutes during the July 16 week.
One of the reasons that the site might be suffering is that there is a lack of access to the public. The only way to transfer Facebook friends over to the new site is using a problematic Yahoo connection which spends most of its time broken.
This means that without all their existing friends, users are less likely to spend time on Google+ and focus attention on social networks back to Facebook.
Google has also been slammed for stuffing up user profiles and brand pages over the past 10 days. The outfit mass deleted profiles based on the criteria that pseudonyms cannot be used for names and users with the same name as prominent figures were deleted too.
It even said users with "obviously fake names" would get deleted - how about people called Jesus or Ramesh? Or Issa? Google's reply shed little light:
"Google Profiles are designed to be public pages on the web, which are used to help connect and find real people in the real world. By providing a common name, users will be assisting all people they know – friends, family members, classmates, co-workers, and other acquaintances – in finding and creating a connection with the right person online.
"We don't comment on the status of an individual's Google+ profile."
Businesses have been unable to set up brand pages. Google asked businesses and brands to hold off on creating an account until support was rolled out and they deleted existing pages.
Most people today, because of cyber crime, and concerns over privacy wish to have some anonymity on the web, especially on social networking sites. Facebook has a reputation for disregarding it's users privacy concern, Google+ recently started deleting accounts of users who they say had fake or questionable user names, etc.,
Google+ & Facebook have a new competitor ONLYMEWORLD that doesn't ask it's users for their real names, and email addresses, allowing users to social network effectively, yet with some anonymity. Easy to use and custom privacy settings. Although still in Beta, and less then 20% complete, the site has the potential of becoming both Google+ & Facebooks rival before the Fall of 2011.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hbgcgahdbgbdenffckohanhobdcnkoip
Never let it be said that with a little ingenuity obstacles can be over come. And for those of you deciding to depart the FB realm and want to delete your profile, go here:
https://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account