Google Plus, Facebook competition may be years away

Though Google Plus has potential to compete with Facebook, but the promised Google Plus vs Facebook competition may be years away
Google Plus is gaining strength very fast. The social networking platform from search giant Google opened its gate to general traffic last month after remaining invitation only for several months before its launch. Since then its traffic has gained momentum and its popularity is soaring.
Though it is too early to say that it is a challenge to social networking behemoth Facebook, nonetheless it has the potential to gain further market share if Google continues to improve it and doesn’t make the same sort of mistakes that Facebook made in the last few years.
Facebook is under immense criticism from many sides on the new changes, especially the ones that are related to privacy of the users. There have been many credible reports on how Facebook continues to track its users by third party applications even a user has logged out of it.
This shocked many a users, some of them say they are going to shift to a new social networking platform, preferably Google Plus to avoid such tracking and compromising on their privacy.
Meanwhile initial statistics about Google Plus acceptability are impressive. Matt Tatham of Hitwise says, “This is good growth…Obviously, when they opened up the site, it did really well. It’s down from that initial peak, [but] now they just need to sustain this traffic growth month over month.”
In the first week following the opening of Google Plus for general public, Google Plus got 14.98 million visits from United States alone. Though it was down to only 7.2 million visits next week, but it was still good and showed that there was lots of potential in Google Plus.
But the new social networking platform still lacks attraction for many a visitors. A reader says, “I was early in on G+ and a vocal proponent, being an avid FB hater. But I deleted my G+ account the day before it opened to the public. FB bloze, but for the time being none of my friends post anything on G+ – they all post rabidly on FB so I only check there .. moving forward if I sense that most of my friends are posting to G+ I will reopen my account .. maybe .. but probably not.. I’m about done with all of it honestly”.
Another reader has this to say, “The people who are tired of Facebook are people who are bored with social networking.  NOT people who are looking for what is basically an exact clone only with WORSE privacy features.  (If you think Google isn’t selling your private information…which they have LOTS more than Facebook does…to advertisers at a premium once they can put a name and even a face to your data, than you are completely out of touch with reality.)”