Thoughts on Google+ as a LinkedIn killer

Google is unquestionably the biggest player on the internet, yet the “search giant” has never quite cracked the lucrative social market. After the failure of Google Buzz, they are making another attempt with the launch of Google+.

At the moment, Google+ looks like a bleak version of Facebook, causing a lot of speculation and online chatter about whether or not Google can take on the social network.

For a moment though, I want to consider Google+ not as a potential Facebook killer, but rather a LinkedIn killer.

One of my initial thoughts before using Google+ was that if it integrated in nicely with the services I already use (Gmail, docs, calendar) then there’s a chance I would use it, but if I had to log into yet another social service, it probably wouldn’t happen.

That is one of the things that stops me from using LinkedIn very often. I have my profile, my resume, my professional contacts and occasionally chime into group discussion. However with a small network, I have little incentive to log in on there regularly and don’t have the need to share with that particular network often. It’s a great resource, but it is a little on the clunky side.

Google on the other hand, is something I can’t live without at work. Search aside, I run Gmail for my personal account and work is run off Google Apps. I share documents with Google Docs and all of my calendars and contacts are synced with Google. Using ‘Circles’ (the Google+ grouping of contacts), I can now also set up work contacts and split up my PR networks from my Digital networks – sharing different information with each.

Suddenly, Google+ is looking very appealing.

Do I want to replicate all of my Facebook info over there? Nope. Do I necessarily want to worry about splitting everything up and double posting while people migrate? Not at all. At this stage, I much prefer Facebook but could happily walk away from LinkedIn if I could have easy access to my professional networks along with my documents and appointments. LinkedIn has a great audience but has always failed to impress me as a platform. I’ll be watching with keen interest to see how this plays out!

One more note on how this competes with Facebook – I think web comic xkcd has summed it up nicely; “on one hand, you’ll never convince your parents to switch. On the other hands, you’ll never convince your parents to switch!”.