The Google+ service has – unofficially – recently passed the 62 million user mark; that’s impressive given how new it still is. Granted, that figure is nowhere near Facebook’s 800 million strong user base, but then again Facebook has been around significantly longer.

It’s been said (even by Google themselves) that G+ is not a social network but rather an "identity service". What does that exactly mean? I’ll answer that in a moment.

I have a G+ profile but don’t use it. It’s not because of privacy concerns or anything like that, but rather for a much simpler reason – almost none of my friends use it. The end result is that standing-in-a-room-alone type of scenario when you can blab on about whatever you want, but there’s nobody around to hear it.

A large part of what makes a social service flower out, so to speak, is whether Big Media takes a liking to it or not. For example, when Twitter came on the scene, it gained a large following in a very short period of time, but when Big Media and celebrities started using it, usage exploded. The same thing happened with Facebook when they introduced public pages with vanity URLs (ex: facebook.com/page-name-here); that was the cue for Big Media to jump on it, and they did.

I don’t see popular media taking a liking to G+, and I certainly don’t see the general internet public taking any strong liking to it either.

Will G+ ever get popular?

Even with the lackluster response of Big Media and the masses to the service, believe it or not my answer to that question is yes – but not for the reasons you’d think.

Google sucks at social and everyone knows this. However what they’re really good at is being pervasive. The Goog is in every corner of the internet, gathering data, providing search and so on. It is their bigness above anything else that will bring G+ to the forefront of being the primary identity of every internet user…

…assuming they remain big.

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