How Will Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter Look in One Year?

Why Twitter could be the social network that outlasts them all.

As we speak, a war is brewing. It is not one with weapons and bloodshed, but one with status updates, embarrassing photos, and nonsensical messages written in 140 characters or less. It is one with things you Like but never what you Dislike. And it involves circles, friends, and a lot of plus-ones.

What is this war that I speak of? If you have to ask, you must have spent the last five years with your face buried in a book while the rest of us got on Facebook.

(to see how to profit with Benzinga Professional, Benzinga’s real-time news feed, click here.)

With the rise of LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD), the birth of Twitter, and the creation of other social networking sites, many thought that Facebook’s reign would be over. But that hasn’t proven to be the case. In fact, it wasn’t until Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) entered the fray that things started to get really interesting. With more than 20 million registered users (estimated), Google+ is quickly gaining a piece of the market. However, when compared to Facebook, which currently has more than 750 million users, Google’s tiny sum doesn’t sound all that threatening.

But could it be? Could Google+ continue to grow so fast that it will one day pose a serious threat to Facebook? Brad Feld, co-founder and managing director of Foundry Group, weighed in during a recent interview with Benzinga.

“I have been using [Google+] intermittently since it came out,” said Feld, who is the co-author of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist. “One of the things that I find most compelling about it is that it uses the ‘follow’ model that Twitter has. But you have pretty fine controls about who you broadcast your data to, which I’ve always had an incredibly difficult time dealing with on Facebook. So it does address certain things in Facebook in a very different way.”