
Google+'s Real Goal is Not to Kill Facebook, but to Force it to Open - tathagatadg
http://marshallk.com/google-pluss-real-goal-is-not-to-kill-facebook-but-to-force-it-to-open
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petervandijck
And the reason they want social Open is to commoditize it. (Same strategy as
Android.) Everything a commodity except for search is the perfect world for
Google.

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bobthebee
True. But to go a level deeper, Facebook is dangerous to Google, because: 1)
The competitive advantage of AdSense ($10 billion in annualized revenue) is
all about having better user profiles that can translate into better
syndicated ads. Facebook will undoubtedly launch a competitor given the hires
they have made. 2) The competitive advantage of AdWords ($20 billion in
annualized revenue) is mostly about having better search results. Again driven
by better user understanding.

Facebook has excellent information on users interests. As opposed to MySpace
and Twitter, most of the data on Facebook is not crawlable. It's private data,
which means that Google is completely locked out. Even if it was crawlable,
the data is not as valuable since Google would have to try to interpret it,
while Facebook knows what it really means.

Summary: Facebook is an existential threat to Google's two major lines of
business AdSense and AdWords. This is going to be a huge drawn out battle. Sit
back and enjoy the show.

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bobthebee
And my assessment is that the article is wrong. Google+'s goal is absolutely
to kill Facebook. With something this important to Google, they want to
control it themselves. If not, there is always the chance that Facebook will
screw them over at the next opportunity and the battle restarts.

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bryanlarsen
I think you're both right. I'm sure they'd prefer to beat Facebook, but they
probably consider that a stretch goal. However, forcing Facebook to open up
would also be considered a victory, IMO.

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tilt
I think Google+ biggest bet right now is to spot, or introduce, the way people
will live the web tomorrow. Changing it from Search to Discover.

And no, it can't relay completely on our friend's interests (à la Facebook)
cause they're their interests not ours.

We'll probably stick much and much more to our beloved communities (topics,
not friends) and start every web-related activity from there. That's something
Google can't let Facebook win on.

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executive
Everybody wanna be a Google+ expert

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orblivion
How is this different from say, every third Hacker News article?

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ghurlman
It's not, but that's another problem.

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rmc
How is Google+ open now? Can I be 'social across networks' with Google+ now?

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InclinedPlane
Google accounts > data liberation

You can export all of your google+ et al data and import it elsewhere
(including your social graph).

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rmc
What other social networking service can I import it into? (I'm pretty sure I
can't import it to Facebook)

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InclinedPlane
None yet, but that's hardly the point, it hasn't been possible before.

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zaidf
Google Plus's UI is still way behind Facebook.

It would be a lot easier for Facebook to fix their holes with
privacy(essentially copying Plus's Circles) than for Google to become more
like Facebook.

We needed someone to put pressure on facebook to give more granular privacy
control. To the extent that Plus pushes Facebook in that direction, I'm happy!

Plus' other features like Hangouts are nice but nothing really that I missed
enough to drop Facebook. Privacy _is_ one thing that I can see myself moving
away from facebook for.

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kmavm
> It would be a lot easier for Facebook to fix their holes with
> privacy(essentially copying Plus's Circles) than for Google to become more
> like Facebook.

Circles are friend lists, a feature Facebook has had for three years.
Facebook's friend lists actually do a few things that circles currently don't:
for instance, you can post to the union of a set of friend lists with specific
people excluded.

They're de-emphasized in the UI because, despite many iterations on it, and a
prompt to this day to add new friends to a list, the overwhelming majority of
users have never created or used one. The functionality has been there for
years, so it is surprising to me that Google is pushing an essentially failed
Facebook feature as their big differentiator.

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MatthewPhillips
Facebook doesn't have circles. All Facebook relationships are built on a
friend request, which Google+ doesn't have. You can't add strangers to a
Facebook list; they are not the same thing.

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jedberg
I hate the fact that the relationships aren't 2 way on G+. Today my wife was
going through people to add on G+, and she kept asking me, "Who is this
person, it says they are friends with you." And I had no idea who they were.
They were people that had added me to a circle, but I never added back.

Yet Google tells other people that we know each other. They make no
differentiation between a 2 way relationship and a one way.

This looks like spam heaven to me.

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zaidf
Yeah, I guess it is google's attempt to make a go at twitter AND facebook.
Unfortunately they are very likely to fail at both.

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arkitaip
In this is truly Google's intention, then they are probably already working on
an interoperability platform and even if Facebook wouldn't join them, new
social networks would find it an incredibly compelling platform to join. Just
think of all the marketing opportunities.

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mindcrime
Well, Google certainly had a big hand in OpenSocial, and I'm guessing that
will be a big part of their strategy going forward, in terms of letting people
plug "apps" into G+.

As for sharing data, and interop, I'd be curious to know if any Googlers are
part of the Federated Social Web working group:
<http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/>

I follow their mailing list, and I can't remember seeing a lot of posts from
people who identified as being with Google.. but that doesn't mean they're not
there. Or maybe Google just have their own plan and are going to do an end-run
around the W3C initiative(s)?

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glassx
I don't know about FSW, but there are some Googlers working with OStatus. And
Google created PubSubHubbub, which is one of the core parts of the
specification.

Btw, omg, I just checked and Google+ is already sorta-compatible with OStatus
in the same way Buzz was, at least for my account... Atom, ActivityStreams,
WebFinger and PubSubHubbub are already there. Salmon is missing but it's a
complicated protocol (took weeks for me to implement it in Ruby), so it's
understandable.

It means you can probably follow a Google+ user with StatusNET or Identi.ca!
You can't mention or share data yet, but I hope it's coming...

For me, federation _IS_ the future. Let's hope Facebook joins the party!

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singingfish
My argument is that facebook, twitter, myspace, g+ etc are web applications in
search of a set of protocols. So that social network thingies become
interoperable like IMAP and the like are.

I'm hoping that g+ is a step along this way, so I broadly want to agree with
the article.

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sensemaker
What about Google+ effect on Diaspora, or is the project already dead?

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streptomycin
Just like Chrome.

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diamondhead
Is Google+ itself open?

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junkbit
Vic Gundotra said that the APIs are coming but they are still deciding on
features while in closed beta

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kenjackson
The answer to this should be easy. What are the APIs exposed to Google
developers.

In the MS antitrust case one of the important things that came out of it was
that internal MS developers had access to the same set of APIs to Windows as
3rd party developers. That is, the CLR or Excel or Sharepoint, for example,
don't have access to special APIs that no one else has access to.

Google should do the same. Anything that GMail, Search, Docs, have acess to,
so should Facebook, Bing, and Twitter.

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contextfree
Microsoft only follows this rule for (NT) Windows, because it was judged to
have a monopoly market share. Windows Phone 7.0 and 7.5 have lots of
capability accessible only to built-in apps such as Bing, for example. I guess
the analogy might make sense for Google search but not the nascent Google+.

(Restricting APIs isn't necessarily just about lock-in. It's a lot easier to
change an API when it affects a few teams in the same company than when it
affects untold numbers of external developers. Keeping it internal for a while
gives them a chance to validate, and maybe iterate on, its design. Hence some
internal APIs of WP7.0 were exposed in 7.5, etc.)

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kenjackson
The reason it makes sense for G+ isn't because of antitrust concerns, but
because it would be consistent with their "do no evil" mantra.

Regarding the second point, I have no problem with Google saying these are
"beta" APIs, subject to change. Their services carry this same label. As a
developer I'd much rather see their full API stack, with some marked as beta,
rather than a much neutered API.

With that said, I'd like to see the same for WP too, but with Google they have
set a public position of doing what is right even if it is against their
corporate interests -- I want them to uphold it -- not just when it is a PR
win.

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bonch
Google+'s goal is to index user data for advertisers, the same as the goal of
every other Google product, from the search engine to Gmail.

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akkartik
And same as facebook. Right?

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Hisoka
I predict Google+ will die out in 1.5 years. It's inevitable. Too many tech
people are saying it's the next big thing.. that's scary... I don't think a
lotta tech geeks predicted Facebook would succeed.. Tech ppl don't know
social.

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illumen
Overheard in the park today, "google plus is like facebook but looks better".
The same thing was said by non-tech people about facebook vs myspace.

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bonch
What you overheard in the park today is hardly evidence of some kind of trend.
Google+ isn't even open to signups yet and is on an invite-only basis, used
mostly by celebrity bloggers and other tech personalities who think every new
social networking site is the greatest thing ever. Even the name "Google+" and
the use of "+1" is too techie and mathematical for a lot of people.

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corin_
The name Google+ is about as scary to non-mathmeticians as Facebook is to non-
biologists.

