
Google+: The Charge of the Like Brigade - devindotcom
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/26/google-the-charge-of-the-like-brigade/
======
espeed
Google+ is not Facebook, and it's just getting started -- At this point, I
don't see how anyone outside of Google could think they have a strong enough
grasp on what's in store to come to these conclusions.

You don't see any Facebook profile postings on Hacker News, but PG had to
change the HN URL format to accommodate all the Google Plus postings.
Moreover, a Google Play link just appeared on my black bar -- Google Plus will
come more into Play as it goes mainstream.

~~~
mikeryan
_I don't see how anyone outside of Google at this point could have a strong
enough grasp on what's in store to come to these conclusions._

I do. I don't believe there's a _feature_ that G+ can add that will overcome
the friction of changing social networks from Facebook to G+.

I think Facebook will eventually lose its luster, but its going to be to
something completely different then another "Social Network".

~~~
Retric
Facebook is dying on several fronts. Most notably it's made a deal with the
devil by allowing it's profitability to become closely tied to Zenga style
'social' games which drive people away. That's not to say it's going to die
quickly, but neither did Yahoo.

I don't know if G+ is going to win or if something else is going to show up.
But Facebook as a public company is going to be squesed to extract ever more
revenue from it's users and that's exactly the behavior that drives people
away from 'free' sites.

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feral
>And second, even if it were broken, Google has never fixed anything before.
>Google never said “What you’re doing is broken. Use our thing instead.” They
always said “Did you know you we can do that too, for free?”

I don't agree. I think they saw search was broken, and then fixed it. I think
they also basically 'fixed' webmail with GMail.

The argument in this article seems spread pretty thin, to me.

~~~
bad_user
I remember precisely the period when GMail was launched and I received an
invitation from a friend. Until then I've been using private email servers
with local clients + Yahoo's Mail.

My first reaction to GMail was somewhere along the lines ... fuck, this is too
good to be true.

The same thing happened when I discovered their search engine. I've been using
Altavista and I actually was late to the party. So here I was in an Internet
Coffee, frustrated that both Altavista and Yahoo were giving me shitty
results, then I saw somebody using Google and I tried it out. The results were
visibly much, much better and the interface was fast, simple and effective.
And I would tell the same story for Android right now, if it weren't for
Apple's iOS that came first.

The article completely misses the point of why Google is Google. They are
engineers fixing things. Which is why I don't blame them for trying out their
luck with Google+. The problem is indeed that they haven't fixed anything in
Google+.

What really worries me is that Google is losing their culture of tinkering,
their playfulness. They will soon fail to capture new markets, to further
innovate, then they'll become evil, using their amassed wealth and influence
to crush competition and to break standards.

------
Tichy
"Google was never good at making new things" - uhm, what???

I suppose if you want to you could accuse everything and everybody of that, as
everything anybody invents builds on things that have existed before it (yes,
even the iPhone). But to accuse Google of that really seems an enourmous
stretch. What about street view and Google earth? Google Wave? Self driving
cars? Container based data centers? Map Reduce? And so on... I am not a Google
fanboy and haven't memorized their achievements, but seriously, they
introduced a lot of "new" things.

~~~
bigiain
'"Google was never good at making new things" - uhm, what???'

Yeah, especially since _Apple_ was pointed out as the opposite - you know,
that company the invented the smart phone, and the mp3 player, and the gui,
and the mouse…

Even as somebody who could quite credibly be accused of "drinking the Steve
Jobs Kool Aid", I laughed out loud at that.

------
zem
> Did they say Excel was broken when they let you make spreadsheets in Docs?
> Did they break down email to its bare bones and remake it for Gmail?

no one had managed to make a good spreadsheet/wiki cross before google docs. i
know because i looked for one for years. as for gmail, they didn't fix email,
they fixed _webmail_. if coldewey thinks they didn't he has clearly forgotten
what the webmail landscape was like before gmail came out. (it is possible
that microsoft's outlook-in-the-browser was up there with gmail; i have never
used that. everything else pretty much sucked.)

~~~
laconian
OWA was crap unless you used Windows IE.

~~~
yuhong
Yea, XMLHTTPRequest was invented in IE5 for OWA, in fact. OWA full finally
supports other browsers with Exchange 2010.

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saraid216
I stopped reading when he made the claim that Google+ is not the success that
"Google obviously intended it to be". Because at that point, you either need
to claim that Google is incompetent from an engineering standpoint or that
they were flat-out lying when they said their scaling up had been outpaced by
the adoption rate several times. Instead of addressing this, the author seems
to have gone with a pseudo-intellectual squintiness that sounds more like an
attempt to mentor Vic Gundotra than analyse the product itself.

~~~
shadowfiend
While I sympathize with your point, I feel like it's a mistake to assume that
just because one point in the post is wrong, no part of the article may be
insightful.

~~~
saraid216
Agreed, but something that glaring suggests that the rest of the article is
less likely to have relevant insights. The article is a nice refresher on Sun
Tzu, for instance, but that's not what it was aiming to be.

------
djt
This article seems LinkBaity.

The truth is that Facebook have successfully copied the features from Google
Plus and put them into Facebook. Much like Microsoft has with the Mac
Operating system. Because they have market lock-in it has meant they have been
able to stop people moving across.

Google don't need to be number 1 in social to "win". Anyone that has
advertised on both platforms can tell you where they put their money.

Also, Google lost a lot of great engineers after IPO and they're probably
hedging that the same will happen at Facebook.

~~~
alain94040
I'll tell you where _I_ put my money: with Facebook Ads. By a factor of 400x.

Yes, when you are looking for "cheap red shoes" just right now, Google AdWords
is wonderful. But when you are trying to sell a product that the customer
doesn't know they want, but you know they do based on who they are, Facebook
Ads blows Google AdWords out of the water. Different tools for different
usage. It's what TV ads and branding has been all about. Who knows, soon
Google may be a niche advertiser similar to late night shopping channels. I'd
hate that.

(You can read a longer version of my experience here:
[http://blog.foundrs.com/2011/04/01/sell-your-google-stock-
li...](http://blog.foundrs.com/2011/04/01/sell-your-google-stock-like-right-
now-adwords-data/))

~~~
mladenkovacevic
If I were paying you to do PPC marketing for my products and you showed me
those numbers and then bragged about how much money you spent on Facebook I'd
have some serious concerns.

------
brico
I stopped using it because I just hate that I'm logged in to googlesearch and
YouTube automatically. While some interesting people post on g+ it's more a
blogplatform, the contentarea when logged in is too narrow and I noticed that
I am very hesitant engaging in a discussion with my real name, not so on
reddit e.g.

------
ojbyrne
Google is a corporation with tens of thousands of employees. In addition to
that, the actions of the corporation are influenced by many outside
organizations and individuals (competitors, regulators, customers, the list
goes on). Even natural disasters affect the course of corporations.

However the business press always anthropomorphizes them into this unified
figure because it allows them to tell a story. But it seems like the longer
the narrative gets, and the more speculation it does about things that can't
actually be verified, the further away it gets from having any predictive
value, and the closer it gets to being cargo-cultish, something akin to
religion.

This story seems a long way out in that direction.

------
ylem
To me, this looks like more of a long game. Why is google in Android? Why is
google in social? I don't think it's in it to win complete market share, but
rather to prevent companies such as apple and facebook creating closed gardens
which it cannot index. Its goal is not to win, but rather not to lose...

------
ak217
> Google has never fixed anything before.

OK, that was a quick read.

Another day, another attention seeking TC writer.

------
mullingitover
I stopped using G+ because I hated their real name policy, and when I
submitted my nickname that I use everywhere else on the internet they rejected
it for no good reason. That was the last straw.

The one thing I've missed about not being on G+ is...nothing. Nothing of value
was lost. Virtually no one I know uses it.

------
Newky
I think the gold in this article is the authors view of what Google should
have done. I agree with pretty much every point, Google by basically declaring
Google+ as "their social push" and "facebook killer", they already had their
head in the noose.

Articles about disgruntled Google employees help in no part to fuel a new
found disrespect for Google which I have noticed emerging rapidly recently.

I love the authors thoughts on what Google should have done, and I would like
to see similar service released by a third party vendor, a simple browser
plugin or even a bookmarklet. Does a simple "I like this" call to a server,
which correlates all your personal likes. Its been done, and done to death,
but I want it to be done better.

One of my favourite things on the internet at the moment is the like button on
youtube, it is my new way of sharing music with my friends. But already I feel
the need to do certain things with my likes. Tag them, write tiny comments
about something my friend have liked. A lot of buzz around pinterest recently,
and perhaps this is why.

------
53_years_and
I was excited by Google+ in the lead up, but once I saw it I just moved on - I
have not seem many comments to support this, but to me its ugly to look at.

------
sounds
I agree that the article has too little to add for all the ominous sounding
words.

But why not make the +1 button private by default? It annoys me that when I +1
something it's public. Shouldn't the total count of +1's be what everyone
wants to know anyway?

I mean, seriously, nobody cares what I click +1 on. Capitalize on that.

~~~
nickpresta
+1 are private by default (the +1 section on your profile is only visible to
you).

You can +1 things all over the web and your friends will only know about it if
you actively share the +1 on your stream.

~~~
cag_ii
If this is the case, they really need to work on the wording... If I hover
over the +1 icon on this article, the popup text states "Publicly +1 this as
<MY NAME>".

~~~
nickpresta
Which site does this happen on, in particular?

------
gbog
Another long "I am boldy lecturing Google" post. It seem to be the new sport
everyone must learn at least once. But this guy missed the most interesting
bit (or I skimmed too fast): the removal of the logo as home of product links
are indications that gplus home (your stream) will soon replace the empty
Google home. How much do you bet?

------
rachelbythebay
>Remember that browser plug-in that sounded a siren whenever it detected
Google in any way, shape, or form?

What's this plug-in? I'd love to see one where people compete to see how long
they can go without using one of their properties. Think of it like a "this
many days since the last on-the-job injury" counter.

------
f4stjack
as far as I've seen the TC articles that make up here, their arguments are
rarely thicker than air. The usual process goes like this: I begin to read,
come up with their assumptions regarding X,Y,Z (depending on the product) as
"facts". I click the little x button and chastise myself again for reading a
TC article with the aim of finding some actual content.

Life goes on...

------
nathansobo
There's a long road ahead. It's way too soon to pick a winner. Many people
will have lots of opportunities to engage with Google's offerings for many
years to come. And they'll have lots of time to refine their products. I think
Google+ was a smart move. Maybe they haven't been hugely successful yet, but I
see potential.

------
Nesterov
I have faith in Google+. Google has a big trump in the shape of the Android
Market, which does not offer integration with Facebook. The Market is growing
rapidly, as is the number of Android users. It's difficult to speculate how,
but I have a feeling this will come in play in the future.

------
rbarooah
GMail was loved by the tech crowd immediately, but took years to make a dent
in the established bases of yahoo and hotmail.

Much as I have distaste for Google+, the strategy needs to be viewed on a
longer timescale. Even search took years to become a mainstream success.

------
buckpost
Excellent insight, including the idea that Google should have simply launched
the +1 button rather than a new social network.

