James, Amy and Robbie Bolton. “Hanging Out with Google” In The Complete Guide to Using Google in Libraries: Instruction, Administration, and Staff Productivity, edited by Carol Smallwood, 65-72. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
In 2011, Google gave up yet another failed attempt at building a social network, replacing Google Buzz with Google+. Google has had a healthy list of failed forays into the social network market (McCracken 2014). Even though the reviews of Google+ have been mixed, at best, it has survived for three years now. Google+ claims a half billion active monthly users but most estimate the number to be closer to half that (Miller 2014). With more than a billion active monthly users, Google+ is not much of a threat to Facebook’s dominance in the social media market (Ha 2014). However, some have speculated that challenging the social media market is not Google’s endgame (Miller 2014). The merits of Google+ can be debated, but the brightest star of all the features is its video conferencing tool, Google Hangouts.
