Either it's going to get better, or it's going to get worse… but Google+ is instituting some new changes that your clients might start asking about. Fair warning, there's a good bit of speculation in the following post, so take that into account.

Every day, I think about killing my Facebook account. While the ability to quickly connect with friends and family is great, Facebook is extremely cluttered, and I still can't really sort out the recent changes to how news feeds operate in several different locations on the page. Mixed in with the dozens of new features around grouping friends into lists, subscribing to feeds, and the billions of companies who run pages and apps there, it can be overwhelming. Nevertheless, I have to use it. Our clients love those pages and apps, and why wouldn't they? You can not beat the ability to target advertising at the level of granularity that Facebook offers (at what some consider to be the expense of it's users' privacy).

Google's offering in the social media space (Google+) doesn't currently allow companies to have a presence, and many people argue that Google's "circles" feature is a more intuitive way to organize friends and control your privacy. Over the next few days though, a lot of this is going to change. Google has announced that they're going to begin to allow Google Apps to operate inside of Google+ and my clients might (eventually) start asking for us to build these apps as a counterpart to the apps they have on Facebook..

Do my clients REALLLLY want a google app?

Even if they think that they REALLLLY do, they probably don't, and here's why: Along with google adding some level of application support (and we're still not exactly sure how complicated those apps can be), google is ALSO adding the ability for users to change their identity at will, and operate under pseudonyms or totally anonymously. I believe they're doing this in direct response to one of the chief complaints about Facebook: You have almost no privacy. As a side note, Zuckerberg has even said that "the age of privacy is over", and drives that statement forward with each new iteration of their site. Google is doing well by moving in exactly the opposite direction.

If the current APIs available for Google+ are any indication of what's to come, the applications are going to have next to ZERO ability to cull information from user profiles, and even if they can, there's absolutely no reason to assume that the information you're getting accurately depicts the person using it. The one metric that we might be able to gather from a Google App, is how many people have installed it, and possibly how much traffic it gets. But nothing else whatsoever. We won't be able to target users with Ads. These should be thought of as small widgets with a very small reach until Google makes some major changes around how apps can integrate with user profiles.

And once they do, I'll probably start thinking about killing my Google+ account too.