

Why Google+ Can Still Beat Facebook - bceagle
http://www.pcworld.com/article/257261/why_google_can_still_beat_facebook.html

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fear91
No it can't. Stop shoving it into our throats.

After Larry Page replaced Eric Schmidt, Google turned into company run by
salesmen(even though Page had a really groundbreaking idea with his PageRank
algorithm). It is not what it used to be in the past.

It no longer innovates. Google's strategy is now more like the one that
Microsoft used - copy successful products of other companies and use your
money and resources as a leverage. In the mean time, to kill the competition,
perform smear campaigns against them or use the vast cash reserves to let them
die the financial death(cutting their margins as in the case of Dropbox).

I mean look at Google's search results, they display google + anywhere it is
possible. The same can be said about youtube, google books. Soon they will cut
off tremendous amount of profit from other websites by introducing the Google
shopping upgrade ( paid placement! something they despised in the past ).

They always defend themselves by saying: "Other search engines are just one
click away. People are free to choose others, but since they stay, it must
mean we do something good."

Well it is mainly people's habits. For majority of Internet users, 'google'
means 'search'. What is interesting is that even if other search engines have
better quality of results, those people will not change their search provider.
People prefer Bing results to Google's results when they are served in
Google's template. That proves something interesting.

I understand - shareholders want growth - but for fucks sake, stop turning
that company into the Big Brother.

~~~
myko
This is ridiculous. Self driving cars not innovate? Project Glass is not
innovative? Google Books, while not particularly innovate, is one of the most
massive undertakings of human kind - storing digital copies of every book in
existence! This is a win for humanity.

You act like Google targeted Dropbox in a recently concerted effort to take
over the space. In doing so you are ignoring the fact that GDrive has been
talked about since shortly after the release of Gmail. In fact according to
Steven Levy's "In the Plex" it was once even ready for customer release a few
years before Dropbox was in existence.

Google+ is the re-imaging of Google. It's not some Big Brother gestapo your
post makes it out to be.

~~~
herval
Every time someone raises this point of view (that Google is flat-out copying
everything they can), someone comes up with "remember Google Glass and the
self driving cars". The problem is: neither innovations are yet on the market
and we frankly don't know if they'll ever be. Just like very innovative
products from OTHER companies as well. Remember MS Courier and Nokia's
flexible/morphing phones?

~~~
myko
Monetization != Innovation

Many of Google's projects are advancing the state of the art, if you don't see
that I don't know what to tell you.

~~~
hackinthebochs
I really have a hard time considering polishing an existing product as
"innovation". Sure its adding value, but innovation it is not.

~~~
myko
Cars that drive themselves is polishing an existing product? What's an example
of something that would be innovating?

~~~
hackinthebochs
I thought the parent post established that we were referring to their _other_
products (basically everything besides glass and self-driving cars). These
products are the ones I was referring to.

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superasn
The problem with G+ is that it still doesn't offer that huge motivation to
anyone to switch social networks. It's still missing the very basic ingredient
of "there should a pain and the service needs to solve that pain."

Like for example before Gmail all email providers only gave 2MB of storage
space and because of that you had to delete important emails daily, which was
a real pain. But when Google came out with its 1GB storage plan in which there
was nothing to delete ever, it solved a very big problem for a whole bunch of
users. So while Gmail's interface is nice and Ajaxy and spam filters rock..
still the reason why everyone went through the trouble of changing their email
addresses was still because of the huge space and no deleting emails everyday.
Because if that wasn't there then I would have never used Gmail in the first
place, let alone realize the other advantages it offered (like better ui, spam
protection, etc)

Changing a social network similarly would also require such a huge motivation.
Going after Privacy or giving Free apps is not reason enough for me or most
users. They really need to solve a very real pain (unlike email this time it's
not very clear what that huge pain is).

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technoslut
The only way to beat Facebook is to disrupt this market and rethink the
concept of social networking. Regardless of which service is better, G+ is not
enough to make users switch. The problem with G+ is that the sole reason for
its existence is to get to access the data that Facebook refuses to share.
When that is your starting point, it usually forbears disaster.

The article itself is poorly thought out. I doubt that people trust Google
that much more than they do Facebook and data portability is a feature that
might please some users but it isn't a significant reason to join nor will
most people take advantage of it.

~~~
Retric
G+ has a higher net growth rate than Facebook sustaining that is all it takes
to win.

Granted, that's hard, but social networks take a while to grow and a while to
die, but Google+ supposely has 200 million users vs FB's 900 million and it's
far younger.
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites))

~~~
badclient
Facebook is successful because of its highly engaging product.

G+ is kind of like a trust fund kid: it has 200M users because its rich
parents(google) decided to aggressively push it to their millions of users.
Their 200M user-base says _very little_ about G+ as a product.

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j_col
Honestly, I have no emotion invested in this whatsoever. Why should I care
that one corporation gains market share over another?

Keep on using one social network over another if that makes you happy, but
honestly I don't see why I should care that my preferred social network
"beats" the other one. Plenty of room on the Internet.

------
jere
>To compete with Facebook, Google must integrate Google+ with its other killer
services so tightly that leaving the Google property you're in and going to
Facebook becomes a hassle.

Google+ can win by making it difficult to leave.

>Google makes it relatively easy to permanently delete the data you’ve banked
at Google+, and walk away. You accomplish this through a Google+ tool called
Google Takeout; with just a few clicks, you can download data from your Picasa
Web Albums, Google profile, Google+ stream, Buzz, and contacts.

Google+ can win by making it easy to leave.

~~~
raldi
You could also phrase that as, "Google can win by giving you the peace of mind
that you can always take your data with you if you want to leave, but making
their service so compelling that you won't want to."

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mikeryan
_For ad targeting, Google can collect the data it needs from the subjects of
people’s Web searches and the content of email, but that data isn’t nearly as
personal and valuable as the stuff people willingly provide to Facebook every
day_

Isn't this statement getting fairly resoundingly proven wrong by advertisers?
Facebook has some great demographic data, but Google Searches tie directly to
purchasing intent. As an advertiser I'd rather know someone was searching for
"mini vans" then that they're a married person with 2 kids.

Everyone keeps touting Facebook's social graph data as its killer product, yet
it seems that Facebook has struggled a bit to really turn it into a revenue
stream on par with Google's search data.

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lrem
Am I the only person seeing G+ and Facebook as too orthogonal to directly
compete? Yes, the tech side is nearly identical. But the communities are so
diverse, that it doesn't even make sense comparing...

I go to Facebook, what do I see? Babies of my friends, party invitations,
jokes that have left Reddit 3 years ago who someone translated a year ago into
a native language and so on. I go to Google+ ,what do I see? Posts, by people
I've never partied with, which actually tend to interest me. There's that
lawyer stuff about evolution of tech-related law. There is some really cool
hacking. Some random excerpts of science. And generally a lot of interesting
stuff, that's not personal and would never make it on Facebook.

~~~
JPKab
This. I see Google + as being much, much more of a LinkedIn killer than a
Facebook killer. I find that for all the purposes that LinkedIn WANTS me to go
to their site and use it (Special Interest groups, etc) I end up going to
Google + for. The whole "sharing with different circles" thing is very
intuitive, and makes it very easy for me to selectively share things with
A)coworkers, B) the public, and C)people in my field of interest that are
possibly future employers, coworkers, or project partners. LinkedIn tries hard
to do this and fails. They were there first, but they are now, for the vast
majority of my coworkers, a place you go to update your resume or look at a
shitty recruiter's broadly targeted message. I get nothing out of the groups,
because they are filled with annoying recruiter spam rather than actual
articles of interest.

Message to Google: Start letting users upload resumes, parse out the data (you
are better at this than other companies) automatically create profiles, and
let users select which aspects of their profile/resume they want to share and
with who. You have 95% of the capability already present.

Get to work, because I find LinkedIn to be mediocre (despite my GREAT, GREAT
respect for the data specialists at the company and their developer's work on
API's)

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rch
My only complaint with G+ is the same one I have for most contemporary
'social' products: inability to select a specific user name.

I would sincerely appreciate it if someone could enlighten me as to why I am
almost always forced to identify myself as something other than rch. Are
random or numeric account IDs really so bad? Were there problems with early
products like ICQ?

Quick edit: I know they dropped the real name requirements - I'm wondering why
a unique, random account id couldn't be associated with one or more aliases,
gmail addresses, etc., which could be aggregated, archived, hidden, dropped,
and so on.

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MetaCosm
I liked this article, but I fear it is more out of hope than truth. I am not
convinced that G+ will ever win.

If it does, it will be because of two things.

#1. Sideways adoptions (Google Docs, Android Phones, Etc)

#2. Walled gardens tend to stave themselves over time. Right now Facebook has
mastered emulating AOL in the sense of "Facebook is the Internet" for many
people. But once social becomes less hip, more a casual part of normal days
the pull (or at least value) of FB will tank, since G+ attaches it to other
things, it might survive better.

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amalag
I think google + is growing slowly but surely, a lot more of my friends are on
it. I like the interface a lot better. It is WAY more polished, facebook seems
hacky compared to Google+

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badclient
Google+ will go down as one of Google's biggest failures. It's a forced
product that is killing bits of Google's soul with each passing day.

~~~
Evbn
It's not a product. It's an shared component and enhancement to all their
products. Look at the name.

------
andrew_wc_brown
Also who cares about Facebook and Google+? Isn't the web moving past social
and onto something new?

I think will see the fall of the Social Empire and these social networks will
break up into smaller social networks.

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mattdeboard
Definitely feels like Google is on a PR push the past week or two for Google+.
Been seeing a lot of articles either differentiating G+ from FB or talking
about how social media marketers can blah blah blah on G+.

In other words, this article and others like it feel like a submarine[1].

1 - <http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

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lucianm
Google+ is dead, just like Ping is dead. The "plus" is just a social network
on top of Google products. Ping is a social network on top of iTunes and we
know how well that went. People don't like "antisocial" social networks.

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capo
But it is NOT meant to beat Facebook!

This whole take on products in a result of the fact that tech reporters are
seemingly unable to frame anything but in a "x vs. y" battle royale.

\+ is meant as a pictured profile that a user would use across all their
offering - which is something they lacked before - and everything else about
it is just gravy.

