By Marty Twelves
In recent weeks, Google has been working to expand its social network Google+ to get more people to come and join. When it was launched several months ago in beta testing, Google+ offered the bare bones of a social media site: profiles, contacts (organized in circles), photos, tagging, etc. One thing it lacked, however, was the opportunity for businesses to create profiles to interact with users (Facebook uses pages for this purpose). Originally announced a week ago, business pages are now available for companies through Google Apps accounts.
Google has also introduced two new features in the hopes of differentiating itself from its more mature competitor: photo editing and Ripples. The former allows users to edit their photos on Google+ itself, sporting features similar to the smartphone Instagram. The latter is a more interactive feature showcasing the spread of posts and links on Google+ in order to see how influential a given user is in spreading word on a topic.
Google’s fledgling social network has struggled to keep its momentum after the site became open to the public on September 20. Traffic in the month of October has seen an increase, but with only 40 million registered users (compared to Facebook’s more than 800 million) the site has yet to rank in the top ten list of most visited social networks (it currently sites at 13 on the list).
