Facebook is joining forces with Twitter - does this spell doom for Google+? If the outcome depends on the numbers, Google+ could be dead. Facebook has more than 750 million active users and Twitter has 100 million, compared with only 20 million users and no signs of growth so far for Google's social network.

Facebook now allows users to update Twitter accounts. This feature will enable a Facebook user to update his or her Twitter account, which will be linked, with every update from Facebook. To start, the user needs to go to http://www.facebook.com/twitter and link his or her profile page to his or her Twitter account.

This probably doesn't mean that Google Plus will be dead on arrival before its official release. Would you change your mind about buying a Chrysler or a Toyota if Ford and General Motors join forces? Probably not.

The integration also doesn't address issues that were exposed by Google+. While Mark Zuckerberg has added a Skype service to counter Google+'s Hangouts, Google+ is still superior with respect to this critical issue: privacy. Google+'s Circles feature lets you share and view content to and from explicitly identified groups of your contacts. Facebook also allows you to maintain your privacy but you need to customize the settings, which for some is too complicated to do.

But one argument, though lame, is that nobody's stalking you in Google+ is because nobody's using the site. Think about the concept of an e-mail account. One has a primary e-mail, a secondary e-mail, and a third e-mail. You open your e-mail account everyday. And you open your secondary e-mail account, maybe once a week, and the third, once every quarter. That would be the case of Google+, it will only be a secondary account or probably a third. With the new feature on Facebook, users will now be able to post updates on both Facebook and Twitter, making visiting Facebook the top priority over other social networks.

Aside from the team-up with Twitter, Facebook has been aggressively adding features. There's the new "subscribe" button, which allows a user to follow the "public updates" of any person, even if you are not into his/her friend list. And there's also a music service, among other updates coming up. Hence, Facebook is now a big ecosystem that let's you do everything you need. It's like an Apple iPad platform that has all the apps. It lets you play games, socialize, have video chat over Skype, send e-mails, and more.

But the integration of Facebook and Twitter may not be greater than the sum of the parts. Aside from the rants, plagiarized quotes in people's status messages, your friend tagged in his grandma's photos, links to some lame YouTube videos, and spam, including products being sold, on Facebook, now you'll have bite-sized or useless blow-by-blow 140-character updates from everyone flooding the social network. When you pump too much air into a balloon, chances are the balloon will burst. And maybe you should just use Google+ to avoid all the chaos.

Data pointed out by developers at 89n show that users still prefer Facebook over Google Plus. 89n reported in a blog post Sept. 14 that it recorded a 41% drop in Google+ posts since July 19. 89n obtained the data by examining the 7,280 users who have integrated Twitter profiles with Google Plus. TechCrunch, though, points out, "86n isn't exactly a research firm," and "they offer little insight into their methodology for gathering and interpreting the data." Huff Post Tech, however, also notes to a similar drop when looking at Google Insights to see who's searching Google Plus in Google's Search engine.

Is Google+ dead on arrival or is it too early to tell given that it's still on invite-only mode?

Note that regardless if Facebook is ahead by 700 million to Google+, it's not about the numbers. It's more on a social network's relevance today and in the future. If you insist on the numbers, note of what happened to Friendster and MySpace.

So, is it Facebook + Twitter > Google+? Or is it Google+ > Facebook + Twitter? The right math goes beyond the numbers.

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