Google Plus
James Whittaker, former Google employee, spouted off in a blog post on Tuesday entitled "Why I Left Google," saying its social media efforts with Google +, for which he was the head of the engineering team, have been a failure "threatened" by competition with Facebook. Google

Since its release in July last year, Google+ trended as the fastest growing social networking site in 2011. At the time of its debut, Google+ was being considered as a serious business-killer for Facebook and other social networking site. The Circles of Google+ pleased most of Internet users. As a result, millions of users signed up on Google+ and started spending time there. But, it did not last long and the same people now seem to have returned back to Facebook, Twitter and other like sites. And, if the latest report by comScore is to be believed, Google+ has now become a “ghost town.”

In January, Google released a report that Google+ has 90 million registered users. With these figures, Google+ is still a small site in front of gigantic score of Facebook, which has 845 million active users and 405 minutes of average time spent by them in a month.

And now, according to the latest research done by ComScore, 3.3 minutes is the average time spent by a user on Google+ in a month. In November, users spent 5.1 minutes in average on Google+. The figure dropped to 4.8 minutes in December. But we’re certain, even Google could not think that the figures can go as low as 3.3 minutes for the January month.

These stats put Google+ even below Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Tumblr in terms of user engagement. On the other hand, Facebook gains the top crown (followed by Tumblr and Pinterest, which shared the second spot) with a time score of 89 minutes. Twitter is at the third place with 21 minutes of average time spent by users. The study also reveals that Facebook is 135 times more popular than Google+ with extremely high rate of time spent by its users. Google+ has not made active users data public.

However, one should not judge Google+ on the basis of comScore’s report alone. The research done by comScore only calculated PC users, leaving out mobile users. Not to forget, Facebook mobile app is widely used on Symbian, Android, Windows mobile and iOS platform.

Presently, Facebook faces no danger from Google+. But write off the SNS from the Internet search engine giant at your own risk.

(Reported by Johnny Wills, Edited by Surojit Chatterjee)

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