Google is coming up with whole new strategy for its social networking service Google+ to acquire more market shares. According to Google’s Product Management VP, Bradley Horowitz “Teens and young adults are the most active Internet users on the planet” and Google+ is opening its doors for teens, describing in post.
Teens and young adults who are old enough (age restriction is 13 year old) and can create a Google Account, will also have access to Google+ account.
Along with this news, another announcement regarding new safety enhancement was made by Bradley Horowitz in same post. New safety enhancement is exclusively deployed for teens which includes sharing content, hangouts (video chats) and to notifications services.
If a teen is about to share a post outside of their circle, then a message will appear, “When you share publicly, people you haven’t added to your circle will be able to view your post and may be able to comment”.
Other restrictions a deployed on video chatting feature, which is widely known as Google+ Hangouts in the offing teens more security. In case a guest (probably from outside the teen’s circles) joins a hangout, then new safety system will automatically take out the teen from the hangout by muting video and mic feed. It’s quite strange that why not just remove guest or possibly don’t allow guest to join ongoing hangout, when posted by teens. Changes made circuit more secured since in case if a teenage make their hangout public instead of private, then live feed will be stopped and unwanted elements will not able to access any of incoming signals.
Similarly, notification services are isolated, in order to make teen’s circle more secure, hence from now on only person how is in teen’s circle can contact them via IM and likely blocking is easily accessible. Any Google+ account holder can config their circles to chat feature, where they can enable it else disable it.
Since different countries have different age restriction rules, for example in Netherlands its 16 or above, whereas, in South Korea and Spain the age limit is up to 14 or above.
In recent, Google has announced that its user tally has now reached up to 90 million users world-wide and now opening gates for teens can boost Google+ growth in social networking market. Unlike Facebook wildfire in past, Google+ growth is much more fabricated than organic. It can be said that, few feature launch timing is providing back to back support to keep the momentum ongoing.
