

Google falls from grace - dhsb
http://mashable.com/2015/04/16/google-bad-year/

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soylentcola
> _" Facebook has always excelled on targeting. Google has really been trying
> to catch up in that regard," says Jeremy Kressman, an analyst at eMarketer,
> a market research firm. Just this week, The Wall Street Journal reported
> that Google was looking to give advertisers a way to target existing
> customers, mimicking a feature already available from Facebook._

I feel like this misses the point of Facebook's strength and Google's (and
other competitors') weakness. Facebook is freaking terrible at targeting.
Essentially every targeted ad or page suggestion they've ever given me has
been laughable. It's not scientific but I've yet to meet anyone who's had a
different experience. With Google's products, you either hear the typical
annoyance associated with any advertising or you hear "it was freaky that
Google knew to show me that!"

The reason Facebook is still huge and Google+ is niche at best is
interoperability. Social networks (this style at least) aren't like email
providers or cell phone carriers where even if there are a few main
competitors, you can't just switch to the one you prefer and expect to keep
communicating with people on the "established" service.

Facebook was lucky enough to be "the one" that got your mom to sign up along
with your grandma, your boss, your doctor, and your ex. Friendster and Myspace
and all of those were big but they never really shed that teen/tween
association for a lot of people. Facebook came up when all of the rest of the
public was mostly ready to see what this social networking stuff was all
about.

And unlike AIM or Hotmail or any of the other big players in chat or email,
you can't just use Facebook with a third party client or another compatible
service. So unless you get _everyone_ to switch over to something else (or you
maintain multiple profiles and sets of contacts) there is little to be gained
by using anything but the single, big player on the field.

The relative failure of Google+ has nothing to do with how good Facebook is at
targeting (or how good the service is overall). Hell, I would have switched
over in a second. Way cleaner and faster mobile app. Nicer website, chat,
voice calling, and all the other stuff Facebook has or added to compete with
Google.

But even though I sorta hate Facebook's site and I sorta love Google+'s
Circles feature, it doesn't matter. Because I'll never convince all of those
people to move over and without them, a social network is worthless. It really
is a shame because it's as if Facebook is the new email except email isn't a
standard and you can only use one provider. It's as if AOL somehow made
regular email incompatible back when they were a massive ISP in the US. If you
had to have AOL to email other AOL users, who would dare switch?

