Should Facebook be quaking in their boots at the challenge to their dominance of the social network space from Google? They certainly seem to have pulled their socks up on the privacy front by coming up with a bunch of new features, including Timeline changes to the way that news stories appear and privacy system updates allowing you to group your friends, in a very similar way to Google+. Of course, Facebook say that all this stuff has been on the blocks for a year or so.

The graph shows that Google+ hasn’t quite achieved the traction that it might have hoped – yes traffic went WAY up immediately after the announcement of the service, but then quickly fell back to the levels that it was at before. The last public announcement of user numbers had Google+ with 45 million users. An impressive number, to be sure, but it hardly stacks up against Facebook, with more than 800 million (and 500 million active users in a single day, which they achieved recently).

Even worse for Google+ is the embarrassing revelation that their senior Execs are poor users of the service: Eric Schmidt the Executive Chairman doesn’t have an account (neither does Board Member Ann Mather nor SVP, Corporate Development, David Drummond), 3 other SVPs have accounts but have never used them.

All I can say is that, once established, networks are hard to displace – the value that comes from being a member of Facebook is not primarily measured in features, it is measured in the fact that your friends are also using the network; wooing those users across will be tough for Google, as they are finding out.

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