Google+ accounted for 35% of Tweeted news links last week
The Twitterverse was in a flurry this week, as early adopters and tech enthusiasts excitedly dissected Google's brand new social network, Google+. — According to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism's …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google+ was barely two weeks old when Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism measured it at 35% of news links shared on Twitter — a snapshot of a launch cycle where the people doing the tweeting were exactly the early adopters dissecting Google's new network. The measurement itself is the story: one product announcement briefly dominated a channel normally spread across many topics.
Google had been laying groundwork around the launch all week. GigaOM argued on July 5 that Google+ could find a home in the workplace, and enterprise president Dave Girouard confirmed via Google+ that Google Apps users would gain access — pointing the network at Google's installed business base rather than only consumer invites. Unconfirmed reports of retiring the Picasa and Blogger brands circulated alongside, hinting at a wider consolidation of Google's social identity.
First-order effects
- Twitter's news-link stream was momentarily captured by a single topic, with Pew measuring Google+ at 35% of shared links — direct evidence that the tech-enthusiast audience driving link-sharing had made Google+ its dominant conversation.
- Dave Girouard's confirmation that Google Apps users will get Google+ moves the network beyond its invite-only consumer test and into organizations already running on Google accounts.
Second-order effects
- The workplace adoption path sketched by GigaOM gets a concrete mechanism if Apps integration ships, letting Google+ enter businesses through existing enterprise contracts instead of competing purely on consumer buzz.
- The rumored Picasa and Blogger brand retirements — unconfirmed, but circulating in the same week — suggest Google weighing whether its older consumer properties fold into the new network's identity, a decision that would affect those products' large existing user bases.
Third-order effects
- If Google+ grows through enterprise distribution rather than consumer virality, Google's social strategy becomes an extension of its accounts-and-apps infrastructure, and launch-cycle metrics like Pew's link-share share function more as buzz indicators than as predictors of durable usage.
The trend: Social-platform launches are now sized by their grip on the Twitter conversation before any retention or activity data exists to validate them.