Dashboard Zone

The number “3″ is a very significant number.

People are accustomed of hearing the “The top 3″, “The three best ways” and so on.

People expect to hear about only the “top three 3″

If you tell them the “Top 5″ they will get the top 3 among the 5 and the tend to ignore the remaining two.

For e.g The top three retailers “Walmart”, “Kmart” , “Target”. There are many more but people remember only the top three.

The same thing is happening in the social networking scene

There are many social networks “Facebook”, “Twitter”, “LinkedIn”, “Myspace”, “Google Plus” etc

Who are the top three today?

Right.

Now, who are going to be the top three tomorrow?

I can easily bet the battle would be between “Facebook”, “Twitter” and “Google plus”

And I can easily bet “Google Plus” is trying every way to be your default social network

and hence has the power of becoming the “number one Social Network“

Remember, not long time ago, Microsoft Internet Explorer used to be the dominant Browser of the world.

How did that happen?

Not because it was super good.

The only reason it was dominant because it was the “Default browser” of the “Default Operating system” of the PC.

Internet Explorer lost the war because it chose not to live

Netscape was the best browser at that time but people needed to know about it through friends and had to be downloaded. Whereas Internet Explorer came free when you bought a new PC. So it was your “Default Browser”. Internet Explorer lost the war because it chose not to live otherwise even today it had all the potential to dominate had it kept up with innovation.

So coming back to the “War of the Social Networks”, today “Facebook” and “Twitter” are very dominant and active. People think “Google Plus” has just arrived into the scene.

That is a mistake.

“Google Plus” was born way before any of the social networks were invented. Google search engine was the ground work and you can easily put the date of birth for “Google Plus” on the same day when “Gmail” was announced. People were dying to get into the early invitation program. People left hotmail and yahoo in hordes to join Gmail.

Today, “Gmail is the default email system” for significant share of the online population.

“Google Plus is now the Default social network” of every gmail user.

Anything that is “Default” has zero friction. Today Google is trying hard to further lubricate it and keep innovating.

With the introduction of “Google search plus” and the variety of “Google xyz +” products and services that are coming rapidly, who do you think has more chances of becoming “the number one social network”?