

Why Google+ Will Take Half of the Social Networking Market from Facebook - jasonmcalacanis
http://launch.is/blog/why-google-will-take-half-of-the-social-networking-market-fr.html

======
dasil003
> * While my BUZZ prediction was way off (thanks to Google freezing
> development!)*

This floored me right here. He's laying the blame of his failed Buzz
prediction at Google's feet? The reason Google stopped developing Buzz is
because it was stillborn. Either man up and take credit for it or else don't
mention it, don't stick a waffle in parentheses and expect people to take your
next prediction seriously.

I remember the prediction at the time because it was so irrationally
exuberant:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1116363>

Google+ is obviously a lot better than Buzz, but I don't understand the
justification for coming with these hyperbolic predictions. There's a big
difference between impressing the bubble-within-a-bubble early adopters
interacting with Jason's punditry and crossing the chasm in the way that
Facebook has done.

Jason didn't give a timeframe for this 50/50 split, but I'll repeat my
statement from 508 days ago with reasonable terms:

Mark my words, 3 years from now Google will not have taken 50% of Facebook's
market share.

~~~
nextparadigms
Perhaps Facebook won't have just 350 mil users 3 years from now, but that
doesn't mean Google+ won't have 350 million users 3 years from now.

Usually the disrupted companies don't notice that company disrupting them is
stealing their users because they are still _growing_ by adding more
_mainstream_ users, while in the same time the disruptor is stealing their
_early adopters_.

This is what happened to RIM and why they refused to believe they are in
danger until this year, and it's what's happening to Firefox.

By now most of the early adopters of Firefox have moved over to Chrome, but
the numbers didn't show that because as Firefox had years of age and its brand
was more known, it continued to gain more _mainstream_ users, and overall even
having a net growth. But eventually the disrupted company reaches a peak when
they stop gaining new mainstream users because the early adopters that have
left start having a major influence on the mainstream, and they start bringing
them over to the disruptive service or product. It happens again and again.

~~~
trezor
_By now most of the early adopters of Firefox have moved over to Chrome_

I'm experiencing the opposite. Google's handling of what used to be a good
browser has provoked me to the point that I do not feel comfortable using
Chrome. I've moved back to Firefox because it's a browser which I can control,
not a browser which controls me.

Chrome's primitive and failed extension-model (still) also makes Firefox look
better when compared head to head.

Chrome used to be a browser for techies, but is now merely a good mom & dad
browser. Because Google explicitly drove development in that direction. It
will probably gain market-share as consequence of that (and because Google is
advertising it fucking _everywhere_ ). However, power-users will probably
leave Chrome now that Google has used them to promote it and no longer sees
any need to appeal to them.

In fact, Google seems outright hostile against any power-user needs at every
single point, bar the web-development module. Everywhere else Google is
dumbing things down at the expense of technical detail. As a power-user I find
this extremely unsexy.

~~~
BvS
Could you give some examples of what Google has changed to make Chrome a worse
browser?

~~~
trezor
There has been several, but I've been back on the FF-wagon for a while now and
it's hard to remember them all. Examples of things which did seriously annoy
me:

URL protocol-obfuscating. Besides being an aesthetic nitpick (lack of
consistency) it allows creating confusing and irregular behaviour with copy &
paste. There was a massive backlash of power-users wanting this toggleable to
no avail. Google's response was basically "we make defaults, not options".

Google's anti-Flash Jihad with added causalities. I never had _any issues what
so ever with Flash in Chrome_. Not once did Flash crash my browser. Never. But
immediately when Google decided Flash was a stability risk and intervened to
isolate the browser from Flash, instantly the result was that having Flash
installed or active would _always crash Chrome no matter what_. Basically
Google forced me to uninstall or disable Flash entirely if I wanted to use
Chrome. Just because they said so. They made the decision and didn't make
their anti-Flash jihad an option for me to enable or disable. You would think
Chrome suddenly crashing on its own for no reason would be considered a high-
profile bug, but this was not fixed at all in any subsequent updates.

After 3 updates without any fix Google had lost me entirely. I'm not even
using Google Chrome for development purposes or verification at this point.
The product is so overly Google-driven and Google-decided that it's not of any
interest to me what so ever as a end-user who wants more than defaults, be
they set by MS or Google.

~~~
ezyang
FWIW, dropping http landed in Firefox trunk a few weeks ago, so you can expect
it to show up fairly soon. Though, it'll probably be toggleable in Firefox :-)

------
gfodor
Facebook's additional growth due to Zynga was a epilogue after it's initial
takeover of the space. Facebook had three big things:

\- It went live one campus at a time. Each campus went from 0% to ~100%
adoption in a viral explosion as the buzz spread around. They had enough
features (photo tagging) to keep college students coming back.

\- The News Feed had the 1-2 punch of being both a huge technical challenge
(causing competitors to lag) as well as a game-changer for the stickiness of
the site and the entire premise of why people go to social networking sites.
It was like nuclear fuel for the two human traits that lead to using Facebook:
voyeurism and narcissism.

\- Facebook from the very beginning valued technical talent. When the News
Feed was released it was clear they were going to be the winners of this
contest since they were probably the only ones capable at the time of building
it and knew enough to build it in the first place.

~~~
IsaacL
I'm confused, what's the technical challenge of the News Feed? Scaling?
Efficiently determining the most relevant news per user?

~~~
pwaring
Efficiently determining the news feed per user is a pretty big technical
challenge when you get to 500m users (which probably means a million or so
news feed requests per second, possibly more).

If you think about it, there are broadly two ways you can handle me posting an
update which appears in my friends' news feeds:

1\. Post an item which is has my user ID as the owner, and each time one of my
friends reads their news feeds you join together all the news items based on a
'friend' relationship (presumably a many-to-many link), order them by
timestamp and do all the filtering necessary where they've clicked "don't show
this kind of update from this user".

2\. Store a news feed per user and update all my friends' news feeds when I
post something new, remembering to keep everything in sync should I delete the
post, be removed as a friend etc.

~~~
windsurfer
I believe the news feed was originally generated every 20 to 40 minutes for
each user, regardless of whether they were on the site. This way, caching was
extremely effective and the architechture could withstand downtime on the feed
generators. I remember a few days where the news feed didn't update at all.

------
vessenes
The analysis seems lacking to me, and a little scattered.

I really like google+: I prefer it to twitter and linkedin, and will use it as
a replacement for them. In my opinion, it's not really a facebook killer,
though; as pointed out here in the comments and elsewhere around the internet:

1) Bootstrapping a very large social graph is hard. Facebook knows this and is
urgently trying to keep Google's mitts off their own graph.

2) The UI design decisions make a world of difference in usage. Facebook just
isn't going to be used like Google+; it does not truly conceive of, or wish to
be, a multi-persona system. Zuckerberg doesn't believe in such a thing, and
neither do his top executives. They frequently push the idea of an integrated
work/personal life in speeches and interviews.

Facebook's design and usability (and privacy settings) exemplify this
approach; they will appeal to plenty of people, perhaps even most.

It takes more brain cells and more effort to keep social interactions
segmented.

The tool appeals to smart online people who wish to maintain multiple personas
on-line; personal and work. Bloggers, and 'personalities' will find it most
compelling, and anecdotally, that's who I'm seeing most in my stream (and
finding it far easier to interact with them thn on their blogs/on twitter,
incidentally).

It will find a great niche doing that; hopefully it will be a giant niche! I
don't think it will replace facebook, or be anywhere near the 50% mark in
users or engagement. It's too brainy a product, made by (great) engineers and
designers, while facebook is still a party.

Generally the fraternity houses throw better parties, engineers make better
cars. This is roughly the same in my opinion.

~~~
vessenes
Incidentally, claiming Buzz didn't make it because Google pulled the plug is
absolutely missing the point; Buzz was brutally confusing, had incoherent
privacy and sharing mechanics, and had no separate interface, it mostly
coexisted with gmail (if I recall correctly).

It was terrible; really. That's why it got pulled, and that's why it didn't
get any traction.

------
faramarz
Why is there so much discussion about what _might_ be the success or failure
of Google+? it's all noise.

In 12 months (even less), there will be enough data to argue definitively, so
what is the reason for having an opinion now. I'm not bashing you for your
opinion, the whole argument is immature. Lets wait a little before
psychoanalyze everything about this.

~~~
pkulak
We're not all 100% rational robots. We work in this field. It's fun to discuss
possibilities; wonder about the future.

And, to be honest, the hive mind is _generally_ right about these things.
Remember Color and how everyone was so sure it was going to fail
spectacularly? And remember how it did? Or how skeptical everyone was about
Diaspora? Or OpenID? Or how early most people realized that Facebook was going
to destroy MySpace? It's not just noise. Well, Buzz may have been noise... and
so may be Google+... but it's fun to talk about it.

~~~
tambourine_man
_but it's fun to talk about it._

The problem is that such speculation often gets disguised as serious
journalism and pundit analyses when, at this point, is just gossip and
opportunistic click bait.

~~~
faramarz
> opportunistic click bait.

Bingo!

------
dspace
The killer advantage that he didn't mention is that Google search is used by a
billion people worldwide, and is probably the start page for at least half of
them. You still have to go out of you way to visit Facebook, by explicitly
selecting it from your bookmarks, but seeing your Google+ notifications will
be automatic and unavoidable.

Sure, some people will turn the feature off entirely or simply not have any
friends to bootstrap themselves into the network, but hundreds of millions of
people will be in a position where their interaction with Google+ will be
automatic, and if you're already interacting with friends there, why bother
going to Facebook?

Quite simply, a lot of people will be on both for a while, and use Google+
more and Facebook less over time.

------
protomyth
If they don't start actually sending invites soon, a lot of the initial buzz
will die and the people without invites will just stay where they are. If the
person in a group who generally gets others on a service cannot get in, then
it will be a problem. I don't think the gmail curve will work the same for a
social network.

~~~
saool
Apparently they opened it up already for all people to join, at least here in
Spain.

~~~
protomyth
I signed up for a notification fairly early but haven't received anything
(USA). I also go to the plus.google.com page and it still has the we will
notify you message.

------
senthilnayagam
too early to predict, Facebook now has real money to compete.

this is googles third attempt at getting traction in social networking market
dominated by Facebook. open social, google wave and now +1.

Yeah this UI is slightly better, but this is a temporary craze period, they
need to keep moving ahead launch usable addictive features, they need to make
it a habit a addiction for its user.

also need to build a usable mobile app for all the platforms,having a android
only app or integration in android core would cause a large drop-off

~~~
X-Istence
Google+ has already completely overtaken anything Facebook has offered me so
far. Their mobile client for iPad is MUCH better than Facebook's. It remembers
position in the stream when you click the back button rather than refreshing
the page, it is faster and lighter weight.

I've only used Google+ the past couple of days but I already am sharing more
content on it than on Facebook, I can share specific content with specific
groups. My family doesn't care about git, but my co-workers probably do. My
boss probably doesn't care for me talking about what beer I am going to knock
back a six-pack of on the 4th, but my friends sure wouldn't mind discussing
that.

Google's Circles has already made that much simpler. As for addicting
features, faster page loads (Facebook uses a lot of JS and it can cause the
page to crawl), instant updates (I was on the phone with my friend, and I
heard him click his mouse and the post was already displayed on my screen),
and the picture quality since it uses Picasa Web as the backend is much better
than what is available on Facebook, and best of all Google seems to know how
to run a CDN since I don't have to wait minutes for an image to show up.

As already mentioned the mobile interface is miles ahead of what is available
from its competitors, and having used the Android app I can say it is
absolutely fantastic. As I am personally an iPhone/iPad user I am looking
forward to seeing what the app will look like once Apple approves it.

------
Rariel
"Facebook won based on amazing technological innovations in the form of the
app platform."

I don't think this is true. I know that people I was friends with on myspace
who migrated to facebook did so because myspace got to be too much of an
online pick up spot/crowded with sparkly graphics

------
adam_albrecht
This seems to assume that Facebook is just going to be sitting on their hands
and watching from the sidelines...

Google+ seems very nice, but from an average user's perspective, does it offer
enough benefit to warrant moving away from where the vast majority of your
social graph lives? I'd say probably not. It'd be like choosing between a
party with decent music where you know 20 people and a party with pretty good
music where you know 2 people. Most will choose to stay at the first party.

~~~
mattdeboard
For me and many others, Facebook has blown it. I want to be the steward of my
own data. I want greater, easier, more granular control over with whom I
associate or communicate online. Unless G+ has an epic fumble, they've got my
eyeballs.

Even if G+ goes belly-up tomorrow, I'm still done with Facebook. If G+ doesn't
grab a huge marketshare, it's shown the NEXT Zuckerberg how to build a social
network without forcing "privacy is no longer a social norm" down users'
throats. Facebook's days are numbered, IMO. Google has successfully exploited
Facebook's weaknesses in such a way that I think everyone is kind of
facepalming and saying, "Of COURSE! Why didn't I think of that?"

~~~
btilly
You are hardly alone. A year ago in a consumer satisfaction survey, Facebook
ranked below the airlines. There is no reason to believe they are better liked
today.

I have to believe that a company that is that disliked by its customer base is
vulnerable.

------
noibl

      Google has a social network and a [mobile] operating system.
      Who’s going to have the best mobile social user experience?
    

While this is an attractive bet, as Google you would have to hope that neither
your OS or network got too popular or you could quickly end up in anti-trust
territory. Android being open-source changes things slightly but it doesn't
solve your competitors' problem (deep integration access to your own stock
devices).

    
    
      Zynga’s IPO filing shows $597.5M in revenue and $90.6M in earnings 
      in 2010. If Facebook had around $2B in revenue and $250 million in 
      earnings in 2010, and 99% of Zynga’s revenue comes from Facebook, 
      the math says Zynga could be nearly a third of of FB’s top and 
      bottom line.
    

That's some funny accounting.

    
    
      $1 invested in Google (at a $167B market cap) will make it to $2 
      before $1 invested in Facebook (at $80B market cap) makes it to $2.
    

That's not so funny.

~~~
the1pato
>While this is an attractive bet, as Google you would have to hope that
neither your OS or network got too popular or you could quickly end up in
anti-trust territory.

Sadly, this is probably true. Such integration may prove too useful to
consumers and too game-changing for Google's competitors. I wouldn't put it
past them to use the federal government to makeup for their lack of
innovation.

~~~
Sapient
I have seen this claim a few times, but noone ever gives any real reasons as
to why.

A monopoly born through a superior product is not the same as a monopoly born
through anti-competitive practises. Noone is forcing or coercing anyone to use
Google+. Facebook and twitter are only a click away, and both are massively
more popular.

Could we say the same if Facebook launched an email service? Or if Twitter
launched some sort of search engine?

~~~
noibl
We're not talking about a mere monopoly, we're talking about exclusive API
integrations in, hypothetically, an OS with majority market share. That's not
something that has historically been tolerated well by courts.

~~~
Sapient
They haven't done a whole lot about MS (which is basically the definition of
this behaviour) though, even looking at Europe.

------
andrewljohnson
Social network markets don't get split 50/50.

They get split 100/0, or 90/10 maybe.

------
latch
that website's background makes me think my monitor is really dirty. really
annoying.

------
sheffield
I don't know if Google will win or lose, but I don't think it's possible to
split that market because of the herd mentality. People follow their peers and
they will all either stay at Facebook or move to Google+.

------
mike-cardwell
Most of my friends wont move from Facebook to Google+ because Google+ doesn't
have support for Events. When it gets support for Events, then maybe some of
them will start to consider it.

------
superset
if they do, it won't be for quite a while. these things take time.

~~~
jdunck
FB 2003 -> 2011: 500M

