The greatest fans are now turning into the greatest naysayers

Oct 10, 2011 19:01 GMT  ·  By

There's been plenty of 'virtual' ink spilled about Google+. Everyone gushed over it when it first launched and for a few weeks, it seemed to do no wrong.

Slowly but surely, its ugly flaws became more and more visible until they could be ignored no more. Indeed, it is now clear that Google+ is dead, it has no future and will be Google's undoing. At least, that's what some 'early adopters' would have you believe.

The early adopter is a special kind of breed of web user. It's naturally attracted to the newest, shiniest thing, but after the initial hype and adoration, he's off to the next best thing, like a kid getting bored with his brand new toy three days after Christmas.

The early adopter has another big characteristic, it likes to tell everyone just how he, or she, feels (and just how wrong you are).

That's half the reason why they'd want to get into whatever website or service launches this week, so they can then tell you about it, how it was cool when they got in and how horrible and stale it is now that you finally got an account.

The ones that are now writing Google+ off are the ones that were lauding it as the next best thing just a couple of months ago. But this fits in very nicely with the eerily accurate "Hype cycle" for technology.

The big problem with this is that Google+ is not designed for early adopters. It's a product aimed at mass market appeal, Google wants "everyone" to join and early adopters, by the very definition of the term, are the ones that want in before everyone else does.

They don't look for the same things as general public in a service and are not going to enjoy the same things. Judging Google+'s future, or present, on what early adopters believe is absolutely pointless.

This is not to say that Google+ is great and that it's future is all rainbows and unicorns. It may very well be another dead-end social web venture for Google.

The early numbers don't point to that, it has some 50 million registered users by now, but there's no way to know how many of those are actually engaging with the site and how much growth it has left. But whatever Google+'s fate, it's not going to be the early adopters that predict it, and it's not them that Google should listen to.