It may not be dead, and it’s entirely possible I’m shoveling dirt on something that’s still writhing around, promising me it is in fact the next big thing, but I’m now deaf to its cries. Google Plus is a failure no matter what the numbers may say.

25 million users in barely a month is nothing to sneeze at. Google Plus holds the honor of being one of the fastest growing websites in history, and these early numbers had analysts screaming that Facebook would be all but dead in a few more months.

But today I click on my newsfeed and see tumbleweed blowing through the barren, blank page. It’s a vast and empty wasteland, full of people who signed up but never actually stuck around to figure out how things worked in this new part of town. One simple click takes me back to Facebook, and my wall is flooded with updates and pictures from 400+ friends. This just isn’t a contest, and it never will be.

To know why G+ has failed, we must first look at how Facebook succeeded.

I'm sure we'll be discussing this on Saturday. :)

UPDATE: The author wrote a follow-up article later in the day as a response to the outcry of support from Google Plus users.

One of the most fascinating aspects about the launch of Google+ is the way it reframes how we, as individuals, interact with our communities. As Brian Solis so rightly points out, the initial Facebook model of creating a single social graph of up to 5000 friends must now be compared to a series of what Google+ calls ‘circles’ that expand and contract as we pass through various life stages, jobs, relationships and experiences in our lives.

This contrast is very instructive as to the future, and is particularly important for brands trying to engage with their customer communities. By now, most brands have overcome their reticence to participate in social media, and exhausted their knee-jerk reaction to buy their way to a sizable social footprint that is at least comparable to their competitors. But the challenges continue to arise.

This new reframing, just as Twitter emerged after Facebook, and Google+ after Twitter, we will see more social platforms emerge that will become increasingly sophisticated and nuanjced in their expression of how individiuals prefer to relate to each other.  Ultimately, it’s possible that these platforms themselves will be designed as templates that the users themselves can customize in terms of the best way to express their community and experience of life.

What this means for brands is significant. It is already challenging to engage and maintain the interest of your customers in real time across multiple platforms, especially as many brands are still fighting the inertia that inevitably comes with hierarchical structures designed with control in mind. But now, as the social business marketplace becomes increasingly fragmented and more and more micro-communities, specific to a variety of media (Path, Instagram) start to emerge, brands face the prospect of reaching an increasing number of specific audiences, conversations and communities all in real time.

With the launch of Google+ came lots of questions. Who should join? Is it another Facebook? Do I really need to add one more weapon to my social media arsenal? Early adopters of new technologies jumped for joy and implored everyone to jump in with them. The more cautious sat back quietly and said, “hmmmmm…”. Where can we find claritiy? Members of the SlideShare community have distilled the complexities and offer answers in the following slideshows.

In “Google+, What is it and why should we take notice?” UK firm Nixon McInnes offers an overview of its features and takes an informed yet cautious approach to adopting the new service.

SEOmoz article with a great list of Google+ tips.

Google’s +1 buttons have only been out for about a month, but they’re already more common than the tweet button on major web destinations.

BrightEdge, an enterprise SEO platform provider, analyzed the 10,000 largest sites on the web and found a 33% surge in placement for Google’s +1 button during the past few weeks. The company found that +1 buttons are now on 4.4% of those sites, up from 3.6% in June. Meanwhile, Twitter’s plug-ins are displayed on 3.4% of the sites.

Both Google and Twitter trail far behind Facebook, whose plug-ins, most notably its “Like” button, are on about 20% of the sites’ front pages. Note: Although the chart below lists Twitter’s plug-in as a “Twitter Share,” BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu says it refers to the Twitter tweet button.

To put +1′s growth in perspective, Facebook’s “Like” button showed up on 50,000 websites a week after the company announced a web-wide “Like” button last April. It was on more than 100,000 sites within a month. Twitter, meanwhile, made its tweet button available to publishers last August.

A Google rep declined comment on the report.

The study also notes adoption for links to Facebook Pages or Twitter feeds on front pages. Such links are much more popular than buttons, but still, more than half — 51% of the sites — have no Facebook or Twitter link on their front pages.

Finally, we have solid answers to many of our Google+ invite questions!

The post sheds light on the fact that the sending of invites must also be received and then accepted within the same limited time frame from when invites become available and when they are turned off a short time after.

So apparently, if you are sharing Google+ invites with your friends, only those who are ready to receive it on the other end and then click the link to sign up will actually find themselves with a Google+ account before Google flips off the switch, as we've seen so far.

Knowing this fact has helped to ease my own frustration and false assumptions surrounding the whole invite process.