Facebook down, Google+ up with customers THE TECHNOLOGY CHRONICLES

Changes Facebook has made to its user experience, such as Timeline, along with concerns over privacy have brought down the social network's consumer satisfaction score, according to a new report.

Meanwhile, Google's social network, Google+, scored fairly high in an annual survey of 70,000 customers by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index and analytics firm ForeSee.

"Facebook and Google+ are competing on two critical fronts: customer experience and market penetration," ForeSee President and CEO Larry Freed said. "Google+ handily wins the former, and Facebook handily wins the latter, for now."

On a 100-point scale, Facebook scored a 61 on the American Customer Satisfaction Index. That score was 8 percent lower than last year and placed Facebook among the five lowest of the 230 companies measured by the index.

Google+, meanwhile, scored a 78 in its first appearance on the index and was boosted by a "lack of traditional advertising" interfering with customers' experience, and a better mobile product, an ACSI news release said.

Social-media companies in general were down 1.4 percent to 69 on the index. The rapidly growing Pinterest was right at that average, while microblogging service Twitter was at 64, and professional social network LinkedIn was at 63.