
Tom Anderson: Google+ makes Google a better, more integrated set of services - genericone
https://plus.google.com/112063946124358686266/posts/SrQrSSXeViq
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andrewljohnson
Most businesses can't "die" suddenly. It's very hard to turn a $850,000,000
business into a $35,000,000 in just a couple of years, unless something truly
catastrophic or industry-changing occurs.

The exception to this rule is social internet companies. Social companies are
built in a day and can die in a day - we've seen it happen again and again,
and Facebook's scale is no protection.

To beat Verizon, you need a network. To beat Google, you need search
technology, data, and great engineers. To beat a car company, you need some
factories.

But to beat Zuckerburg, all you need it timing and a good strategy, and
equivalent engineers. And in this case, Google seems credible on all fronts.

This is the first serious threat to Facebook's existence.

~~~
stevenj
I think unseating Facebook is much harder than you think. Not impossible, but
very hard.

I'll make a friendly $100 wager with you that Google will not have more active
users on Google+ than Facebook has -- as reported by each company, a reputable
publication, or measured by a public analytics firm -- 5 years from now.

~~~
knowtheory
I'd put you on the losing end of those odds.

Google's key to driving adoption is going to be integration of all of their
services into Google+, which means that they have very natural and robust
funnels for acquiring a userbase, so long as their tools are integrated
properly.

Given the money that Google is pouring into this, and the incentive structure
for engineers and teams at Google, i have no doubt that they will come up with
clever ways to make their tools more social.

~~~
DrCatbox
'Social' is the new 'cloud' buzzword.

What does it mean to have social products? To tap into a users social network?
That is what Facebook offers to any company that wants, and that is why 2/3rds
of websites now have a Like and Facebook Connect button on them, it is very
easy for any service to attempt the social route by tapping into the thing
that only Facebook so far has, the social network.

Google cant engineer a social network using code, a social network requires
specific steps to be carried out in perfect order, it cant be done overnight,
you need to build smaller networks and connect them to larger networks as time
progresses. It takes a long time, years even.

Reddit is social, hackernews is social. None of them have what Facebook has,
real world information about living people and their relationships. Here on HN
I could have 5 or 6 accounts and no-one would notice, HN, reddit and any other
"social" product does not have relationships between humans. Google mail is
close to a social network, except the fact that email is mostly used for
business and so is most suited for something like LinkedIn, I personally have
more companies mailing me than my friends. If I tomorrow made a new google
mail account and began using it instead of my old one, would google be able to
tell? Facebook for sure would.

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murz
> 'Social' is the new 'cloud' buzzword.

New? What rock have you been hiding under?

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stevenj
Thus far, I've only heard industry insiders and participants praise Google+.

In technical fields, like medicine, or even computer science research, I'd pay
close attention to such commenters.

But a product like Google+ was made for the masses. Just like Google.com was.
Just like Facebook was.

So until my non-tech friends start praising Google+ as if it's a must-see
movie, or a song I have to hear, or a restaurant I have to try, I'm
discounting these views.

I'm not saying Google+ won't be successful. I'm just saying that the people
who are saying it's going to be The Next Big Thing aren't the people who make
The Next Big Thing, The Next Big Thing.

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jellicle
Well, considering that even if you were invited within a few hours of the
product launch, you've still never been able to actually log on to Google+ and
use it, I'm afraid it's not really possible for the unwashed masses to chime
in at this point. Unless you want them to talk about how great the screenshots
look.

~~~
btilly
Uh, not true.

I am not inside of Google, and multiple people in my social network who are
also not in Google have been using Google+ in the last few days. The product
has been very usable.

~~~
jellicle
The product for me, and for the vast majority of every human who has ever
tried to use it, consists of a page saying:

"Already invited? We've temporarily exceeded our capacity. Please try again
soon."

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btilly
The majority of people I personally know who tried, got in.

But try again. You never know when you'll get in. (A birdy suggested that your
odds are pretty good now...)

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nrbafna
Google+ does make everything fit in so well.

1) Picasa, just received a shot in the arm. Integrating it with Google+, would
definitely see a surge in its adoption. Also, since people are going to use it
anyways, they might seriously consider backing up all their images to Picasa.
Fits right in with the Google's cloud philosophy.

2) Huddle - This is Google Talk for mobile done the right way. Given that iOS
app is on the way and hopefully a Blackberry version, this can take on the new
iOS messages and I dare say, the blackberry messenger.

3) Google has got the integration of notifications right, always there and yet
very subtle. The top bar redesign makes sense now. With Buzz, there was a
feeling of the service forced down on, in your gmail account. But, with
Google+, the service notification are everywhere. web, images, books, news, g+
and yet the users do not seem to mind. Integrated the right way.

4) It has the potential to be The network. Facebook, might be a serious social
network, but no is really going to use the FB email as the primary email
address or as the one for formal usage. Google+ covers that. It can be your
formal network; the one for friends; your primary photo service and more.

5) It would be killing, if they would Hangout a.k.a. group video chat would
make its way onto the mobile apps.

This might seem positively biased, well, I do _love_ Google.

~~~
roc
I've been wondering lately if Google killed Wave prematurely. If they'd
polished the interface a bit more, Google+ notifications would've solved the
problem of updates. They could also have dropped bot and widget support into
Huddle. Imagine a robot that could parse a "what's for lunch" comment into a
sort of multi-user UrbanSpoon widget with voting/vetos/suggestions/etc.

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nextparadigms
Notice how people are starting to use Google+ as blog posts? It even looks
like a blog post. If only the URL's looked a little bit better, it would be
perfect.

And I agree with him. So far I love Google's unifying strategy, not only
through deeper integration but through having similar, more streamlined design
as well. And I feel this is just the beginning. I think we'll see a lot more
of it this year.

~~~
jamesbritt
_Notice how people are starting to use Google+ as blog posts? It even looks
like a blog post. If only the URL's looked a little bit better, it would be
perfect._

I just did that, then found that "public" didn't really mean public; the post
was still only visible to people with Google+ accounts. Oh well. I then copied
over to my actual blog. But I would like to have a true public option even if
it only meant read-only of such posts.

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icebraining
I don't have a Google+ account and it's visible to me.

~~~
jamesbritt
Very interesting. Whatever link I initially grabbed to test in another browser
gave me a page that said a Google+ account was needed.

But just now I looked at the post and noticed a dropdown-arrow next to it
which revealed an option to get a link. That link is indeed publicly visible.
Also insanely long and ugly, but whatever, it works.

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Apocryphon
I think you just have to be logged into Gmail or another Google account to see
it.

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seagaia
I think Tom is pretty mature about MS being outcompeted by the other social
networking sites. That's quite pleasing to see.

I feel that inevitably, I will somehow end up using Google+, despite my lack
of need (or want) for it at the moment, though.

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krashidov
I must say, Google's decision to make Google+ invite only was puzzling at
first but its quite obvious now isn't it?

It's much like how Facebook grew by restricting its service only to the top
schools. This gained more hype for them as people saw that the 'elite' were
using facebook and loving it.

Now we have personal invites to those who have a strong voice in the tech
industry generating lots of good publicity for them. I'm not saying your a
Silicon Valley elite if you have google+ account. But I think that the
decision to keep google+ a private was more marketing, then a technical
decision.

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Lewisham
No, it's very clear why Google+ is invite only. Google+ is in field test. It
needed to be tested publicly in order to start really getting a good
understanding of what users are doing and what the scaling problems are. There
are already a bunch of things that are essentially getting hotfixes in < 1
week.

The only reason that Google+ was announced was that this process couldn't have
been done in secret. I'm sure if there was a way to have got everyone in at
the same time, they'd have done it.

~~~
krashidov
Hmm perhaps, but were google+ invites completely random? If so, then I
probably am wrong and it truly was a technical field test with no marketing
gimmicks.

Either way, having a closed invitation has genuinely made me more interested
in the product.

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Lewisham
Invites were not random. Google chose those to invite.

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Nemisis7654
Would you happen to know how they chose? I am just curious.

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clawr
I work at Google. An invite form was sent to employees prior to launch.

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Nemisis7654
Okay, thanks.

What about non-Googlers? I feel like there would have to be some sort of
algorithm that did it for you, what with how many people use Googles'
services.

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mk
I was thinking something similar to this last night. Google+ unifies the
product set. Even the new Google mobile web is unified and easier to get
around now. I can see it pulling me into products that I don't really use much
just because it's more convenient.

~~~
nkassis
I like the new dark bar at the top. It feels like an application now ;p I
don't know why it just feels more integrated to me just for that. It's not
much different then the previous bar they had but whatever I guess it makes me
think of the windows start bar.

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nextparadigms
I find myself spending a lot of time in Google+ and eventually running out of
content that I can see from my friends or even incoming shares. I want to
discover new content and new people in Google+ the same way I discover it on
Twitter.

So I hope Google will make the search bar work for content shared within
Google+ as well, not just for people. Doing this would get people to spend
even more time on Google+, reading other people's opinions or discovering
their shares, and perhaps even meeting them through it.

I want to read more content from other people on Google+ and I can't right now
because I don't really have a good way of finding them. I hope Google was
already thinking of activating this, but they didn't because at launch there
wouldn't have been much content anyway.

And before anyone starts saying I should use Sparks, it doesn't work the way
I'm suggesting. Sparks is more like a Google search. What I'm asking for is
_searching within Google+ for shares and people_ , just like on Twitter.

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Eliezer
You will hear nothing about Google+ a year from now. You heard it here...
well, probably not first, but you heard it here.

~~~
Baughn
That seems like an unwarranted level of confidence. Could you explain your
reasoning?

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khafra
He's using Reference Class Forecasting[1]. Without digging deep into Google+'s
unique features, he's betting that it will do roughly what other web services
in the class "Facebook competitor" and "Google-owned foray into social
networking" have done in the past.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting>

~~~
Eliezer
Eyup.

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bonch
Just not interested in Google+. It was enough of a struggle to coax me onto
Twitter and Facebook. I don't hear non-techies talking about Google+--it's all
dedicated bloggers and people in the "Twittersphere" (ugh).

Not to mention that I heard all sorts of revolutionary praise for Wave when it
was released.

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nkassis
The thing that is hooking me in Google+ is that it's just my google account. I
don't really have to think about going there unlike the other services. And
what killed Facebook for me was the UI. When it became too cluttered I just
got tired of it. I hate battling with a website. Google+ UI seems more
polished already that what Facebook has/had(I haven't used it seriously in the
last 2 years. I sporadically log in and feel like I'm going through my email
thrash. )

~~~
nextparadigms
I've always thought Facebook's UI was mediocre at best, and slow. Google+ is
beautiful and super fast. It's simply better in every way than Facebook.

