Recently Google took a blatant decision to promote Google+ where ever it could find white-space. Due to this, Google has been at the receiving end of a lot of flak from social media and marketing experts.
People are not annoyed with the intent to promote a company’s native social network on it’s own platform but the method employed by the company to do so.
Did you see the 'Google Wave' logo ? HAHA!
Excessive promotions help only if the product is worth it. Now it’s up to you to decide if Google+ is really worth all these eyeballs. Even though it’s a fact that G+ was the first social networking site to reach the highest number of user base within a few days.
But activity wise Google+ couldn’t compete with Facebook and Twitter. To sum it up; Google+ was innovative but not revolutionary. And today internet users demand change, not the same old concept presented in a different way.
Sign-up using the old Google Accounts form
This decision to promote G+ also brought in a revamp to the normally clean yet long Google sign-up form. Now if you try to sign up a new Google account you’ll be shown 3 steps.
It means that you no longer need to sign up differently for a GMail and a Google+ account. By sign up, I mean: having to fill extra fields when opening your G+ account.
Old Sign-up form
But for the time being you can escape those long steps by just navigating to the old form. A handful of Google products & services like calender, blogger, etc still present you with the old form.
The URLs of both forms can be deceptive as they start with the same sub-domain accounts. Both the URLs look like this,
New form link
https://accounts.google.com/SignUp
Old form link
https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount
Take full advantage of this old sign-up form as Google has already hinted that they’ll centralize registrations all across it’s products soon.
Don’t you think Google is over-promoting Google+ ?
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Twitter: bloggersethics
January 22, 2012 at 5:46 pm
If I should admit, I like Google’s old look. It was nice and cool and without many complications
Well, I think Google obviously knows that facebook is its closest competitor in terms of internet traffic. Facebook is #2 visited site in the world? Crazy.
Google Plus is just their attempt to capitalize on this massive social media market.
Twitter: luganikaran
January 23, 2012 at 2:55 am
I agree to your point that the old google interface was much better. Google should accept the failure of Google +.
Thanks for the information. I really didn’t’ like the new way they have changed things.
Twitter: NickStamoulis
February 1, 2012 at 7:58 pm
Google knows that it has a captive audience. It’s a smart move on their part to try and get search and Android users to get active in Google+. It seems like Google has big plans for the social network moving forward and wants to capture as many users as possible.