Kyle
Google+ wins social app of the year at the 2012 crunchies photo: TDG Media
The 2012 Crunchies just ended in San Francisco California. Despite being constantly pegged as “Apple Fanboys”, TechCrunch, GigaOM and VentureBeat gave the award for best social application to Google+.
Google released Google+ their new social network just six short months ago and they’ve been building scale at a rate quicker than any other social network in history. Two weeks ago during Google’s fourth quarter earnings call, CEO Larry Page announced that Google+ had 90 million users. Again, a major feat for a social network launched in late June.
More after the break
Google+ wasn’t Google’s first foray into social networking. They tried twice before. Their first attempt was Orkut, which was a challenger to MySpace when it was released. Orkut has actually found a strong user base in Brazil.
Google’s next attempt at social networking came in 2010’s “Google Buzz”. Buzz was a short form social networking app similar to Twitter. Buzz didn’t ramp up nearly as well as Google+ did. Buzz was also the source of an investigation by the US government’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The end result of that investigation was a settlement with Google that became a precedent for issues of privacy and social networks.
Facebook found themselves agreeing to a settlement agreement similar to Google’s when they got in hot water over privacy. Both companies are subject to FTC audits over the next 20 years.
Google+ saw some great milestones in the last six months, which is why, with only half a year behind them they were named the Social App of the year.
Google + launches on June 28, 2011
A week later they launched social statistics.
On July 12th Google+ was projected to reach 10 million users.
Two days later on June 14th Larry Page announced that Google had 10 million users and 1 billion items shared.
In December it was announced that Google+ had reached 67 million users in November.
source: Crunchbase
2 Comments
Leave a reply →
Comments are closed.