Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2011 as news from 29 June 2011, the day after Google+ was unveiled. The experts’ prediction that it would knock Facebook off the top did not come true: Google shut down the consumer version of Google+ in April 2019.
Yesterday we reported on Google’s ultimate social network, Google+. Media around the world covered the stellar launch of this social network, which, according to experts, is more than ready to knock Facebook off its perch as the leading social network, although users will have the final say. Either way, it has had no shortage of early publicity.
Chinese censorship was also to be expected. According to TechCrunch, yesterday millions of people in mainland China tried unsuccessfully to access Google Plus. China doesn’t want competition, since it already has plans for its own home-grown tech entrepreneurs.
In China, Google+ now joins Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in the same place: isolated and censored, blocked from use on the mainland to make sure those 600 million active users can’t use foreign services.
As we said in a previous article, China will be the biggest threat to dot-com companies, not because of its competitiveness but because of unethical methods in a trade war, methods that even border on illegality, since they are based on “unfair competition” and censorship.
Featured image: User:Vmenkov, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
