

Why Google + Will Win - kadjar
http://m.garrettamini.com/2011/07/why-google-will-win/
It's been one day, and I'm sold.
======
michaelchisari
You know, if all these different social networks just worked towards an open,
federated protocol, we wouldn't have to play this game every few years.

~~~
ender7
Why is everyone being downvoted in this thread? On HN, "I disagree" != "I
downvote".

~~~
esrauch
Excuse the question; I've been on here for a couple months now and there isn't
a down arrow on the website UI at all. I've tried a few android apps and they
have down arrows but I wasn't really sure if they actually worked since points
are hidden from view. Is downvoting just not possible without a greasemonkey
script, but its still enabled on the server or is there something I'm missing?

~~~
michaelchisari
You don't get a downvote arrow until your karma hits a certain level.

~~~
esrauch
Ah thanks; that makes sense. I haven't felt any particular desire to downvote
anything on HN anyway, I was just curious.

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gfodor
Time and time again we see Google make the same mistakes. They are tone-deaf
as to why Facebook is successful.

Sure, circles will get plenty of usage in the Bay Area, where the people who
built it probably felt if only they could build this one extra feature then
people would come flocking to them away from Facebook. But this misses the
point.

Nobody on Facebook, other than techno-geeks, have been clamoring for this. Are
you the type of person who would consider deleting your Facebook account?
You're probably also the type of person that will be interested in Circles.
But, you also are the type of person that, unlike 99.99% of the rest of the
population, can comprehend having a social life without Facebook being the
glue.

Facebook is cool. Facebook gets people laid and lets you participate in more
debauchery online once you have stumbled home drunk from the bar. It doesn't
feel like a hospital room or a bathroom, it feels like a party.

If Google wants a chance to usurp Facebook's dominance, it needs to do so
under a different brand. Repeat after me: the Google brand will never be as
cool as Facebook.

More importantly though, it needs to figure out what Facebook is missing. No,
Circles are not what Facebook is missing. There's certainly _something_ that
Facebook is missing, that the cool kids would want, but odds are whatever it
is wouldn't pass the smell test of the type of things Google would consider
building.

Imagine you are at a party. It's fun, the music is good, there is booze, and
the people are good looking. What's missing? Google's response would be: "The
music is hard to hear, we should upgrade the speakers." Facebook's response
would be: "cocaine."

The reason Facebook has come up to where they are, after all, stems from the
big brass balls they've had for pushing up against the standards of privacy
and even decency held by society today, something Google has never and will
never be able to (or should want to) do in return. This is why Google will
keep fumbling around trying to "out-innovate" Facebook, and will fail again
and again in spectacular ways. It's sad, but endearing.

~~~
skymt
Is that why your mom uses Facebook? Because it's so extreme, debauched, and
envelope-pushing?

~~~
gfodor
The generation that matters isn't my mom's or my own for that matter. It's my
younger brother's. And, yes.

~~~
foobarbazetc
I don't know why you're being downvoted since what you speak is the truth, but
have an upvote.

Anyone who thinks the average person is going to start using Google+ instead
of Facebook is delusional at best.

Just listen to those Google+ introductory videos. Who the hell talks like
that? Friends being worth your time -- what? "Adding people to your life"? Are
these people real?

Here's the real deal: Google+ is sterile and lacks originality -- it's just
Buzz and GTalk with a new uninspired interface.

Being able to group people in circles with JS animation is only exciting to
geeks. No one else gets off on contact/group management.

------
mikeryan
My reason why Google+ will fail. No one but the technorati will care.

(this sounds snarky but I'm quite serious)

Everyone seems to think Circles is a game changer, I'm not so sure. While it
seems like a considerable improvement over managing lists in Facebook, I
really don't believe that people like my mom really care enough for this to
combat the network effect that Facebook already has.

Similarly this is the _only thing_ Facebook does. How long will it take them
to steal any innovative interface ideas G+ has? Can Google really stay ahead
of Facebook in this space?

~~~
neuroelectronic
There is a lot of things that Facebook won't do that Google+ can do. The
reason managing friends lists in Facebook is so god-awfull is because Facebook
wants it to be. There is also several other interface eccentricities put there
to make the site harder to use in certain ways. The reason for this is to
protect their user data and make it hard to corrupt or hide it and make it
easy to expose it and add to it.

The bottom line is Google+ will probably serve ads programmatically,
leveraging AdWords and other similar automated technolgies within the company.
Facebook has nothing like this, it sells its user data to 3rd parties who
could be doing anything with that data.

~~~
iamcalledrob
I'd just like to correct that last point.

Facebook doesn't sell any data about its users.

~~~
neuroelectronic
You are delusional. _any_ data? Facebook doesn't sell _any_ user data? Not
only do they sell user metrics, they sell actuall user generated content.

~~~
iamcalledrob
They don't sell any data.

------
michaelperalta
The cool argument is the wrong way to go with why Google+ will fail. The real
value that Facebook provides is information. Free and open information about
anyone and while some people view this as an invasion of privacy they are
kidding themselves. The reason Facebook has become so addictive is because of
the things you can find out about people, different people who aren't
necessarily your friends. I understand that people have this idea that they
only want to share things with their friends and there is an easy and simple
way to do that on Facebook, only add your friends. In reality we don't want to
or really we don't mind that people who aren't our closest friends know the
things about us we put on Facebook. Facebook's lack of "privacy" is its most
valuable asset not only to their own business model but to their user base as
well. As someone in another comment said its the college kids that push the
adoption of sites like this and from my own perspective and that of people I
know, Facebook's privacy issues have never been the big deal they are
portrayed as by the media. Google+ is shooting themselves in the foot by
focusing on creating "real friendships" and closed information circles because
in reality the reason many people like Facebook is because of the openness it
inspires.

A feature that I've seen a lot of the media cover as well, Hangouts, is one
that while useful in certain situations I think displays how Google is missing
the overall concept of social networking. Hangouts is a great feature if
you're in a pinch and need to for some reason host a multi-person video chat
but so is oovoo, another group video chatting fad. Its a feature that while
nice is not a hook for many people and really doesn't relate to the overall
theme of social networking. Social networking's goal is not to create the most
realistic online portrayal of your life. It's really, from the perspective of
the company, to make managing your network of friends easier and make
connecting with them easier and more efficient. Video chatting is not the most
efficient way to manage these relationships and is not a unique way to conduct
it either as there are many video chatting services that are widely adopted
such as Skype. While video is still an important part of our lives with
streaming content and live broadcasts, in the sense of the video chatting it
is more closely relatable to the phone call which we all know is not favored
today like the text message. Which should tell Google something, we as
consumers don't want "real relationships" on our social networking site. We
want like the text message to have our social network be an efficient and fast
way of sharing information, something Facebook has mastered.

Overall Google+ does not bring a bad platform as much as it brings an
unnecessary platform to the table. Could there be a cult following by older
people who want to strictly share content with their family members? Possibly
but more likely than not I see this idea getting a long for a while on its
Google name and then folding. The best application I see for Google+ would be
a simple collaboration tool for small businesses through the use of group chat
and video chat along with the rest of Google Apps.

------
zmmmmm
> If you already have a gmail account, you will soon have a G+ account.

But what is the penetration of Gmail? 200 million users? Every one of them
could fully embrace Google+ and they still wouldn't have 1/4 of the userbase
of Facebook.

For this reason I think point #4 should have been listed:

4\. Android - Nearly every Android phone owner ends up with a Google account
and, we can expect, in the near future that will also mean having the Google+
app prominently positioned and well integrated. At 500k handsets a day this
growth rate alone will give Google+ a huge leg up.

~~~
potatolicious
> _"But what is the penetration of Gmail? 200 million users? Every one of them
> could fully embrace Google+ and they still wouldn't have 1/4 of the userbase
> of Facebook."_

Network effects and critical mass. It's hard to launch a brand new social
network because people have a high impedance to creating an account on
anything.

If 200 million people created a G+ account, how many _non_ GMail users will
follow simply because their GMail-toting friends are on this newfangled thing?

Facebook launched from an initial pool of users that's far smaller (just
Harvard) - IMO Google's way of breaking the chicken and egg user-signup
problem is pretty awesome.

------
xelipe
To me, G+ feels a lot like the launch of Google Buzz. Technologist rushed in,
Robert Scoble, Leo Laport, and Jason Calacanis immediately had thousands of
followers. Each of there posts received two hundred comments but most non-
techie users didn't get sucked in as much. Sure Google Buzz had a botched
launched and a slew of privacy issues but those were not the only problems it
had in attracting users attention.

Circles is cool but people already have difficulties with private direct
messages. Also, people don't want to curate lists.

------
ceph
"For a social network, MySpace was incredibly introverted"

Not sure I agree with this. In my experience there was a lot more friending of
strangers on MySpace. It was sleazier.

------
petervandijck
"In the beginning there was myspace" - not really. In the beginning, there was
LiveJournal. And Friendster.

~~~
hugh3
Pah, in my day we'd just email stuff to huge copy-and-pasted lists of the
email addresses of everyone we knew.

------
far33d
Facebook already has circles. They're called friend lists. Adding UI sugar to
make circles (if people actually wanted them) would be nearly trivial. For
instance:

<http://www.circlehack.com/>

~~~
joebadmo
True as far as it goes, but I think more imporantly, it's instructive to
consider which company _did_ it.

------
mrchess
My experience with G+ is a lot like Google Wave. It was fun for 20 minutes,
then the novelty wore off and I found it cumbersome. For example Circles... my
father has 3 e-mail addresses, and I need to add them ALL to the Family
circle, thus duplicating him 3 times.

With facebook, individuals are one-to-one, but on G+ it is possible for them
to be one-to-many.

As much as I hate to say, I'd rather use what I already have, and what all my
friends have... facebook.

~~~
georgemcbay
My experience with Google Plus is also like my experience with Google Wave but
in a different way -- I think the service is very cool but the "slow trickle"
invite system is making it mostly useless to me (what's the point of a social
network when hardly anyone you know in real life is on it?).

If this plays out like Wave, by the time a critical mass of people I'm
interested in interacting with are on the service I'll have lost interest.

------
Jach
For all the "circles" flying around, when I first heard about it I figured I'd
be able to do some set-theoryish organizing via venn diagrams. But I can't.

Maybe I want to send a message to my "friends" circle except not this friend
in that circle, and maybe I don't want a new circle for that new group but
just for that message (or maybe I do want a new circle on the fly like that
called "friends minus person" or "true friends" or something). Maybe I want to
send a message to everyone who is in my friends group and my schoolmates
group, but not people who are just in one or the other. etc.

And the feedback button on the circles page is stuck on "analyzing the page"
so I have to come and post here. Edit: Looks like that was caused by a script
blocked by noscript.

------
nextparadigms
Sums it all up pretty well. The solution for Facebook is probably what
Facebook will do anyway. But it won't work. You can't just patch up disruption
onto your old technology/business model. You have to start from scratch to
compete, and that's something Facebook can do, which is the beauty of all
disruptions.

I know Google+ doesn't exactly look like a disruptive innovation at first
sight, but more like a direct competitor to Facebook, but if Circles _re-
defines_ the game, then that pretty much means it's a disruption and it will
take the path of that all disruptive innovations take, which is to _replace_
the incumbent (gradually).

~~~
esrauch
The thing is that Facebook is likely implementing literally everything that is
on Google+ right now. If they launch every feature they have before Google+
goes public then the only advantages that Google can possibly maintain is
integration with their other products.

------
mark_l_watson
While Google has made mistakes (I am still sore about them dropping Wave - I
liked the Robot APIs + AppEngine) I agree with the author that supporting
multiple groups (circles) is what most people want. I don't want my family to
have to sift through computer science stuff, my technical friends to have to
wade through my latest hiking pictures that now are just visible to my hiking
circle - etc.

------
callahad
The design of Google+ is nice, but it has its issues. For one, how do I figure
out which of these people is my girlfriend? <http://i.imgur.com/V843H.png>

~~~
ktsmith
I completely agree that you shouldn't have to hover over the cards to figure
out what email address they are associating with each card. That's a huge
blunder.

~~~
callahad
Actually, hovering doesn't reveal the email address in this case. I only see
the "Sharing via email only" text, and I can't quite work out what determines
whether or not I see an email address, some descriptive text (Google Talk?
Google Profiles?), or nothing at all.

------
winsbe01
good read.

after all this talk about who will win, though, why don't we all just use
what's best for us :) can they both exist simultaneously? i don't know, but if
enough people like each of them, then why not?

------
georgieporgie
Reason why none of that matters now: Zynga's crack-like games.

2008: You sign up for Facebook and are immediately bored. Then you discover
pokes and inane surveys, and have some fun once a few friends are signed up.

2011: Facebook entertainment has become Zynga's click-slave crack-code, and
that's what brings in the 'normals'.

Google+ is where Facebook was in 2008, but without the fun.

These are the first questions I had upon signing up to Google+, and to my
knowledge they are unanswered:

* Where are my friends?

* How do I bring over my contacts from Facebook? (the Facebook --> Yahoo --> Google+ thing was ridiculous)

* What can I do for fun?

Google+ has exactly the same problem that almost every other Google product
has had: its value isn't immediately apparent. It's amazingly opaque for a
product that people hope will dethrone Facebook. Add to that the fact that
there are none of the 'fun' things that Facebook has, and I fail to see how
this is any sort of competition.

~~~
hugh3
_Where are my friends?_

They seem to be showing up one by one.

 _How do I bring over my contacts from Facebook? (the Facebook -- > Yahoo -->
Google+ thing was ridiculous)_

Ah, but that's exactly what I _don't_ want to do. I want to start over with a
friends list that contains people I actually like and am comfortable sharing
stuff with, rather than a sundry collection of people I met twice plus folks I
sorta-knew at high school plus ex-girlfriends I can't bring myself to
defriend.

 _What can I do for fun?_

So far it's mostly "talk to my friends". And that's not too bad!

Right now, G+ seems like a more "grown-up" place than facebook. If the market
segments so that twenty-and-thirty-something professional types are primarily
using G+ and facebook remains the hangout of choice for cow-clicking high
schoolers and their grandparents then I'm fine with that.

