Google’s social network still has a long way to go before reaching the success of its competitors. Although it looks really good and has some interesting features, users are not flocking to change from what they are familiar with and what they’ve been using for years. Besides not offering much innovation at this point, G+ still has some catching up to do in terms of usability and features.
When compared to other social networks, one of the disadvantages Google+ had, was the lack of vanity URLs. Until now, the criteria by which the pages were declared eligible were very strict. A couple of days ago though, Google announced what users have been waiting for, for quite some time: Free vanity URLs for everyone. Well, not really anyone, but the minimum requirements are fairly decent:
– the page/account needs to have a profile picture
– the page/account needs at least 10 followers
– the account needs to be at least 30 days old
Although this was really good news, after reading the terms and conditions (yes, some people actually do that), things did not actually look so rosy afterallor . Here is why:
Whether or not the new vanity URLs are some kind of teaser or trial, we are really happy to have them. No one liked the unpractical long URLs (e.g. plus.google.com/111644671979712029306).