The big news recently, if you haven’t heard, is that Google+ is a really big deal. I know that I even made fun of it when it first came out but you can’t make fun of it when it becomes the #2 most active social networking platform, just behind the obvious #1 Facebook.
Yeah, that’s right. Unbelievable statistics and the proof is in the pudding:
Google+, who despite being branded a failure or ghost town by large portions of the media, grew in terms of active usage by 27% to 343m users to become the number 2 social platform.
Interestingly for Google, YouTube (not previously tracked by us as a social platform) comes in at number 3, demonstrating the immense opportunity of linking Google’s services through the G+ social layer.
This is also a key indication of why Google+ integrated with the Google product set is so key to the future of search and the internet.
Check out these unbelievable graphs:
Hey, it gets even better:
Yikes. When everyone and their mother is talking about Twitter-this and Twitter-that Google+ has silently continued to grow up and to the right.
In terms of WordPress users and even developers and designers it would behoove you to consider Google+ in both your design layers as well as in your development to a certain extent. And if you’re an online publisher it means that you need to get cracking on Google+ as soon as you can.
So, What Gives Jetpack?
But this begs the question – why isn’t Google+ a standard publishing feature in Jetpack, the heavily used and updated plugin? As you can see here it’s not an available option for publishers to publicize with:
Before you get all up-in-arms about it there’s a valid reason why: Google+ currently does not have a writeable API. Sorry folks, Google+ API is just read only, so there is no direct way to sync and push updates.
Sadness.
Sure, you can do it manually (like we do) by hitting the “Publish” button on a blog post and then going to the blog post itself and clicking one of the available Jetpack share buttons, but that’s too many steps for super-busy publishers!
Yes, I’m complaining, but with this new recent research it makes sense to at least keep it on the bucket-list and implement it as soon as it’s readily available.
Ok. As you were.
[via Forbes]
19 Comments