Recently Google took a blatant decision to promote Google+ where ever it could find white-space.
Due to this, Google has been at the receiving end of a lot of flak from social media and marketing experts.
People are not annoyed with the intent to promote a company’s native social network on it’s own platform but the method employed by the company to do so.
Excessive promotions help only if the product is worth it. Now it’s up to you to decide if Google+ is really worth all these eyeballs. Even though it’s a fact that G+ was the first social networking site to reach the highest number of user base within a few days.
But activity wise Google+ couldn’t compete with Facebook and Twitter. To sum it up; Google+ was innovative but not revolutionary. And today internet users demand change, not the same old concept presented in a different way.
Sign-up using the old Google Accounts form
This decision to promote G+ also brought in a revamp to the normally clean yet long Google sign-up form. Now if you try to sign up a new Google account you’ll be shown 3 steps.
It means that you no longer need to sign up differently for a GMail and a Google+ account. By sign up, I mean: having to fill extra fields when opening your G+ account.
But for the time being you can escape those long steps by just navigating to the old form. A handful of Google products & services like calender, blogger, etc still present you with the old form.
The URLs of both forms can be deceptive as they start with the same sub-domain accounts. Both the URLs look like this,
New form link
https://accounts.google.com/SignUp
Old form link
https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount
Take full advantage of this old sign-up form as Google has already hinted that they’ll centralize registrations all across it’s products soon.
Don’t you think Google is over-promoting Google+ ?