Flickr photo by Stuck in Customs

If you follow the major online influencers (yeah, I’m talking about you, Scoble, Brogan, Kawasaki, Rowse et al) you’ve noticed that all of them are gaga over Google+. For sure, G+ is a fascinating platform with tremendous potential. Google took some of the best features of Facebook and Twitter and rolled them into an easy to use (if difficult to fully understand) social media network.

But despite its upside, G+ is far from perfect. And while those smart guys in Menlo Park will surely be adding features and improving things in the coming days, weeks and months, here are the Top 10 reasons Google+ will fail:

10. Here come the spammers

9. Two words: Google Wave

8. Privacy? What privacy?

7. No search. No hashtags.

6. You’re in my “Friends” circle. I’m in your “Asshats” circle.

5. Keeping your circles organized is a lot like trying to keep your sock drawer organized, but only if you have 1,000 pairs of socks in 100 different drawers.

4. Search, e-mail, chat, maps, YouTube: Do you really want Google to have this much control over your life?

3. Cat gifs

2. It’s Google’s way or the highway.

1. I’ve got to use Picassa. Really?

For the past several months, JC Penney was inexplicably at the top of the Google search results for everything from dresses to area rugs. Let that percolate for a bit. JC Penney? Really?

Well, it turns out that JC Penney either knowingly or unknowingly through a third party, gamed the Google search engine to the tune of tens of millions of extra hits a month for the past three to four months. There’s no telling how many of those hits translated into online sales. But you’ve got to figure the retailer got a major boost during the holiday shopping season from its undeserved search engine rankings. The New York Times’ David Segal dishes the dirt on JC Penney’s foray into black hat SEO in “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search.”

The company bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet top curtains”).

This striking performance lasted for months, most crucially through the holiday season, when there is a huge spike in online shopping. J. C. Penney even beat out the sites of manufacturers in searches for the products of those manufacturers. Type in “Samsonite carry on luggage,” for instance, and Penney for months was first on the list, ahead of Samsonite.com.

JC Penney is apparently paying the price. Google’s punitive action includes pushing the brand deep down into the nether regions of its search results.

The link farming tactics revealed by the NYT have been going on for years. What’s perhaps more disturbing is that it took the NYT to blow the whistle on JC Penney. Where were Google’s safeguards? We’re talking large-scale manipulation of search rankings.

Did Google turn a blind eye? Or is its internal security system so lax that it could let such a massive black hat operation go on for months?

Just two years ago did anyone think that Facebook would be going head-to-head against Google for ruler of the Web? Google? Of course. The Internet giant had no peers in the search engine business, it’s Gmail had become the dominant email provider and it had added blue-chip tech start-up YouTube to its lineup, not to mention the even bigger purchase of Double-Click in 2007 (here’s a list of all of Google’s acquisitions)

The question wasn’t whether Google was king but whether any company could challenge its supremacy in the forseeable future. While Facebook isn’t in Google’s league when it comes to estimated market value, it has carved out a niche in social media that Google has, so far, failed miserably at tapping.

Now, it seems the gloves are off. Mashable’s Ben Parr writes about the heavyweight tilt in “Facebook vs. Google and the Battle for Identity on the Web.” Parr says that it’s Facebook’s 500 million users and the who knows how many more million Google users who are going to end up the losers:

Facebook won’t be using Gmail contacts anytime soon and don’t hold your breath for Facebook Connect on Google. These moves are to be expected from two companies that are essentially at war, but it’s the average user that has to take the extra steps to upload his or her Gmail contacts into Facebook to get started that is really impacted. It’s about the millions of users that won’t get the benefits of Facebook integration in Google or Gmail. It’s about a war that is only going to get uglier.

In a few years, the lines will be drawn between Facebook and its allies and Google (and whoever is willing to join it). Digital walls to data portability will go up if companies are forced to choose sides. If things keep going in the direction they are headed now, that is the likely outcome.