

What G+ is really about (pst it's not social) - fttechfounder
https://plus.google.com/photos/100238778462210489846/albums/5629087019815403777

======
ulvund
On Facebook you buy ads for ~$1+ because you can set target demographic to
something as specfic as "women; 42-47 years old; looking for relationships
with other women; with a degree in biology or computer science; attened
Harvard; Works at IBM; who likes horseback riding or skiing"

Imagine if google knew BOTH your search term and your complete personal
history. Then the ad price and conversion would increase enormously.

That is what Google is trying to get a piece of.

~~~
cdavid
I am not convinced it is that useful to have explicitly targeted audiences for
advertisement. It may be better to understand and interpret an ad campaign,
but generally, what works best when doing statistical prediction is not what
is the most intuitive.

Also, even though your example is obviously not meant to be taken as is, it
shows that targeted demographics quickly don't have a lot of data behind them.
Successful stories in AI usually involves lots of averaged data with only
little "focused" data to adapt your model quickly (e.g. as done in speech
recognition where models are estimated on 1000s of hours from many speakers,
and the model is then adapted for the one speaker to be recognized).

I think the value of the so called social graph for advertising is
overestimated. IMO, what's interesting about facebook is more the amount and
diversity of data than its personalized nature. But then, I have little
knowledge about algo for advertisement targetting, maybe the situation is
different than the domains I am familiar with.

~~~
rachelbythebay
Who says it's about effectiveness of the ad? It might just be effectiveness of
getting money from the advertisers. More data means you can do more hand-
waving to say that this ad will be the one that really really reaches people
this time.

~~~
JanezStupar
Because in the end if ads are not effective, you won't be getting money from
the advertisers anymore. Marketers can't know in advance which marketing
channels will work - so they kinda carpet bomb with their campaigns. However
once they start getting data, they sure as hell kill of the channels that
don't work.

Unethical behavior does not scale in business, no matter how much your
calculations rationalize it. In the end people just go away from sleazy
businesses. GM and Ford might tell you a story about it and millions of others
short term profit oriented businesses also.

Theres only so much bullshit you can pile up before your reputation catches on
to you.

~~~
mtts
As much as I'd like to think you're right, you're probably wrong. The
advertising industry is making very real money, which gives people an
incentive to keep it going even though it delivers close to nothing.

Why do people buy Coca Cola? Is it because of the tremendously expensive
advertisements they put out or is it because the stuff is ubiquitous, tastes
fairly good and is usually not surrounded by a lot of competing products at
the places where it's sold?

Don't believe me? What about if you're in a restaurant that sells only Pepsi.
Do you leave the restaurant in search of another that sells Coca-Cola? Most
people probably don't, thereby proving that all the so-called "positive
emotions" advertisements instill in consumers do absolutely nothing when the
time comes to make purchase. Theoretically, yes, in a situation where you can
choose either Pepsi or Coca-Cola for (roughly) the same price, Coca-Cola's
advertising campain may have an effect, but such situations are exceedingly
rare. In most purchasing decisions there are variables that have much more
significance than the advertising history of the products.

So ads are, probably, not effective. And despite this fact, there has been an
industry selling them for over a century and that industry has been getting
richer and richer, thereby proving that you can perfectly well build a
business on scamming people and keeping it up indefinitely. You do, however,
have to keep playing around with some superficial parameters of your business
model to keep it convincing. Which is exactly what Google is doing here.

(btw, I use - and love - Google's services, but never in my life have I
clicked one of their ads or even looked at one for more than a split second)

~~~
JanezStupar
I was talking of marketing in general. Advertising is only a single branch of
marketing.

And its obvious that Coca-Cola's marketing has been waaay better than Pepsi's.
And also I believe that Pepsi is quite comfortable in its #2 position. As is
Burger King in its own.

Don't forget, that second biggest player in a huge market is usually still a
friggin big behemoth. And that for Pepsi and BK being #2 is a core business
strategy. Less upside, but also less downside. These companies basically use
their bigger competitors as a hedge against market change.

~~~
mtts
Ok. I guess I was confused because the grand parent talked about advertising
(Google's targeted ads).

Marketing in general, I agree, has some non-bullshit aspects to it. Not many,
though.

But certainly the marketing that causes Coca Cola to be sold in way, way more
places than Pepsi has been very effective.

------
JonnieCache
Why can't it be many or all of these things?

I find it highly implausible that google has as strong a desire to form
simple, narrow narratives around its strategy and ambitions as bloggers and
the media do.

------
currywurst
Great usage of the G+ photo viewer for slides, but I don't think G+'s main
focus is about moving apps/games into the cloud ..

The most convincing argument I have heard is that 'social signals' are (going
to be?) a fantastic resource for cutting through the spammy, link-swapping www
of today.

~~~
revorad
Social signals also have a lot of noise. It may be even harder to tell the
signal from the noise in social signals.

~~~
currywurst
Yeah, good point. However, if Google only uses the signals from my circles, I
could be insulated from the noise :)

------
code_duck
I'm not quite used to seeing a photo of myself in the top bar across Google
sites, but I can certainly see where they're taking this is more than the
'facebook killer!!' the media would make it out to be. Google has a lot more
to offer as a company than Facebook - YouTube, Docs, two OSs, a vast ad
network, search and news - in addition to their features which overlap with
FB, such as Blogger or Picasa. Google+ is unifying all of that into a very
impressive product, which is rather unprecedented. I'd be looking at what
Apple thinks, too. And Amazon... it's definitely not just about Facebook.

------
arkitaip
It's times like this that I wish HN was curated. It seems that everyday we get
posts like this where some random person - "I'm a first time tech founder; I'm
also a first time programmer." - conjures up a bunch of ideas supported only
by their imagination.

~~~
JanezStupar
I think his usage of G+ album to create a presentation was awesome and
inspiring.

Also I believe he has a point. And found his message to be more lucid, clear
and entertaining than 90% of three paragraph ramblings about this and that
around here.

And just as a conclusion. Bill Gates was once a radnom person, as was Larry
Page, Steve Jobs, Paul Graham, etc...

Maybe you should focus more on originality and evaluate merit of these ideas
instead of only craving for more stuff to be fed down your throat by current
status Quo holders.

And I believe that this is what HN is about. HN is curated, by HN community -
and it's obvious that HN community believes this contribution's place is at
the top of the front page.

~~~
arkitaip
What was his point? Where's the data to back it up. That's right, there's
nothing of substance, only speculation. If your high profile names wrote some
speculative piece I would consider it equally worthless. Either your
argumentation has merits or it doesn't.

I don't think you understand the meaning of curation. Curation doesn't imply
censorship or that a certain group of people filter content based on a certain
set of value, rather it means that they would ensure a high signal to noise by
removing posts that don't really contribute to a discussion.

~~~
JanezStupar
I think you're over analyzing. G+ is out for barely two weeks now. It has not
even been released to the general public. Any internal strategy Google itself
has is merely of speculative nature until it gets proven or not.

Any great strategy is merely speculation also is figuring and/or anticipating
other peoples moves. A great strategist needs to have a great gut feeling and
be lucky. When Napoleon was presented with a new officer and after his merits
have been presented to him, he supposedly asked "Very well, but is he lucky?".

That is why bean counters never get to do anything great. And that is why
people love good speculators. And all the guys I mentioned are incredible
speculators.

Not everything can be quantified and analyzed. And regarding curation - the
community has decided that this specific piece of speculation is interesting
and insightful. I hope I don't need to remind you that this particular mob is
not you average Joe Sixpack mob?

------
podperson
Right now, G+ is populated by a bunch of early adopters and it's pretty nice,
mostly because 90% of the folks you know and only keep in touch with out of a
sense of duty haven't gotten in, and G+ doesn't support superpoke and Zynga
yet.

Even so, with a smallish population of users and the spammers still figuring
out how to operate, G+ has some serious usability problems (like you can only
see 2-3 items in your stream at a time on a high resolution display) and it's
already getting kind of spammy. In to succeed, Google needs to maintain laser-
like focus of usability and continue to innovate on a small number of features
-- it can't just glom random stuff onto it or integrate random GoogleLabs
projects.

For those whom Google Docs is a suitable replacement for Sharepoint, I doubt
integrating G+ will make a huge difference. For those for whom Google Docs is
inadequate, G+ won't tip the balance. If G+ takes the proposed approach it
will actually alienate many potential users. It's better to embrace the
outside world than replace it. (And, in fact, it contradicts the "blue ocean"
strategy.)

Frankly, from a big picture strategic viewpoint, it's great to see Google
annihilating Facebook, but it's fiddling while China burns. It's losing
search, and no-one in China aspires to own an Android phone -- they're saving
up to buy iPhones and using non-Google Android phones while they wait.

~~~
jamesteow
"Even so, with a smallish population of users and the spammers still figuring
out how to operate, G+ has some serious usability problems (like you can only
see 2-3 items in your stream at a time on a high resolution display) and it's
already getting kind of spammy."

My feed has interesting/funny comments and links... because I just put
interesting and funny people in my circles. And I don't consider the fact that
I can only see 2-3 items on a high-res display bad if the quality of the
content is higher than other sites I visit. There are some blogs whose index
page have the same issue and I'm fine with it because I know that every single
piece of content posted is well worth the surface area.

------
drdaeman
G+ is about moving _everything_ into the _Google_ "cloud". In a same way
Facebook (and VKontakte, and whatever else) is about moving _everything_ into
their "cloud".

Cloud is a buzzword, it doesn't really mean anything here.

G+ is just a Buzz (thus, GMail) + GTalk + Picasa + Latitude + Google Profiles,
covered under one convenient interface. You can't peer with it, you have to
actually use it itself (i.e., have and maintain an account there). Yes, there
are some APIs to control that account (FB has some, too), and you could have a
backup copy of your own data, but doesn't really matter.

It's still almost exactly the same as Facebook.

~~~
JanezStupar
You can't do that YET.

As far as Cloud hype & buzzwords goes. I was of same opinion until I started
doing my startup. Now basically all infrastructure I have (besides my personal
computers) is of SAAS nature somewhere in yes Cloud.

We could say Internet, but that would be confusing - since Internet is such a
broad term.

For what its worth as a reformed nonbeliever I'm telling you. Cloud is awesome
and its here to stay. So you better get used to it.

~~~
drdaeman
Cloud is a good thing, but it is pointless buzzword in that context. "Cloud"
is when you distribute your stuff over some cluster of physical machines. This
increases reliability, allows to scale performance, simplifies deployment and
so on. Does it matter to end-user how Google infrastructure's organised
inside?

Sure, some cloud providers have compatible APIs (as this is the case with
Amazon S3 API), so the data could be moved between "clouds" easily.
Compatibility is not a general property of a "cloud", and moreover - this is
not a case with G+.

And SAAS is not a "cloud", it's just that nowadays most SAAS are marketed as
"cloud" because they internally rely on some distributed storage or processing
system. It's just that "cloud" quickly became a buzzword, replacing cumbersome
"SAAS" abbreviation.

We've had SAAS in 90's (and, probably, earlier). Remember hosted forums,
webchats and guestbooks? This was certainly SAAS, and probably not a "cloud".

------
rmc
Summary: Google+ is an attempt to move applications/things onto the web, and
make sharing and coloborating easier. The goal is not to take on
Facebook/Twitter, but to take on MS Office and App Stores

------
radarsat1
> "do you know how often people still email documents / photos /
> spreadsheets?"

Great, so G+ is yet another attempt to get people to stop using common
communications standards like email and instead break the internet up into a
set of distinct one-provider-oriented services that can't talk to each other?

~~~
s00pcan
No, the goal is to make it not matter what service you're using.

~~~
a3_nm
In which way? Could you elaborate?

~~~
s00pcan
There was a post on here about it recent enough, but I don't think I saved the
link. It basically suggested that it shouldn't matter what social network your
friends are using - you should be able to seamlessly connect with someone who
is using facebook from google plus.

I would expect that idea to apply to apps and the sharing of documents as
well. If your friend is not using google plus, the document could be sent to
their email instead, but the though process would be "I need to send them this
document" instead of "I need to email this document to them" or even "I need
to send them this document using google docs".

~~~
icebraining
But how does Google+ help accomplish that goal? It's a closed platform just
like every other has been; for that you need federation APIs (like those of
Appleseed & StatusNet) to enable cross-server communication.

------
nl
No, it's about social.

The other stuff is already happening, and Google is winning.

------
jwingy
I remember reading somewhere that Google's overarching policy is really a
"scorched earth" policy where due to the "fuck you" money afforded them by
their search business, they are able to offer services and products from which
their competitors (probably anybody in tech) derive their core business from
for almost nothing. Effectively this creates a moat around the Google castle
with the surrounding land razed, allowing no one else to subsist or grow large
enough to ever challenge them.

Sometimes I believe this...sometimes I don't. Any thoughts?

~~~
divtxt
Here is the "scorched earth" post:
[http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/03/24/freight-train-that-is-
an...](http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/03/24/freight-train-that-is-android/)

I agree with it regarding Android & Chrome OS, but I'm not sure that it
applies to web apps like G+, gmail since those have per user costs.

------
MaxGabriel
Why can't it be about both? Also, from the perspective of Google, why let
Facebook enjoy the 'blue ocean' of social, if the blue/red ocean is such an
important concept for new products?

------
leot
G+ is also about giving Google a much richer social relationships graph than
anyone has ever had. I can only wonder at the long-term effects of the
information asymmetries that are developing. At least with twitter (and fb,
for that matter) most of the relationships were public.

------
contextfree
So ... social networking isn't "blue ocean", but office suites and app stores
are? Huh?

------
david_a_r_kemp
From where I stand, G+ is about advertising - the more information Google have
about you, the better they can target ads at you, and therefore the more
likely you are to click on their ads, thereby making them money.

------
nwmcsween
G+ is a move into social media, what's a better way to have live data on your
user base than the data generated by a service you control, and maybe why
profiles must be public.

------
mirkules
FYI, it's really hard to see the blue ocean / red ocean slides on my mobile
device, and enlarging them only makes it blurry (samsung galaxy s). It's funny
because I got to the punchline and couldn't read it. I still don't know what
it says other than guessing that it's all about the apps.

~~~
fttechfounder
Thanks for the tip, do you know if anyone else has had problem reading it on a
mobile device?

~~~
msg
It was ok on my HTC Desire.

------
siphr
Nicely done and easier to follow. Although I think just like any good business
Facebook cannot let it's guard down no matter what this presentation says.

------
Ryan_IRL
I just like how G+ helps me share internet jokes with my friends, and at the
same time, still be within my anti-social comfort zone.

------
hm2k
I guess this is why there's no Google Chrome App to compete with Tweetdeck.

~~~
mmavnn
Tweetdeck has a Chrome App. I have it open in Chrome right now...

~~~
hm2k
Please re-read my comment.

------
fabjan
I really don't see Google allowing people to share apps they bought.

------
quinndupont
I can think of better ways of displaying that information. Ugh.

------
gcb
it's not mobile either... completely impossible to read that on android

~~~
icebraining
It's bad for those of us who don't like to use the mouse too. I wonder how is
the rest of G+ with regard to keyboard support?

