yes but its just a profile page for now - its not a network until it lets you establish connections to other Google users. It will be cool though once you can, then you can see your friends on mobile maps, in Picasa, gmail, chat etc.
There is an overall strategy shift at Google. Years ago they talked about how apps were basically the results of 20% time. Each app was an isolated silo, developed in different programming languages, at inconsistent locations and they shared nothing. Google claim that this is what enabled them to be innovative. Some apps were born out of organized teams (like Calendar).
What is happening now is that Google realized that many of these applications duplicated functionality. for eg. contacts in gmail, contacts in calendar etc. They are starting to centralize the common components like the user profile and links to apps. Friends will be next.
The result: a platform, not unlike facebook, except the 'apps' are much better and come from Google. OpenSocial becomes the API to this platform, and they fill it with users from their search market share. The Google API becomes the new web API and they won't have to regret not buying Facebook because by that time they have all their users on an 'unintentional' social network with kick-ass apps.
Schmidt said that Google is now 'search, ads and apps'. Until recently there was no strategy to apps, but now there is: they are taking over and providing the new web OS.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say this won't work. Google doesn't have the right sort of talent to create a working social network. Perhaps they'll get a small cloud of apps, but that's it. We won't see Google working as the active hub for people who want to talk online. We won't even see Google with much of an informal social network like you describe.
The reason is that Google sucks at design. Don't get me wrong: they're incredible with ideas! Some of the designs of their sites work incredibly well because they are conceptually leagues ahead of anything else. Gmail was like that when it came out, and people loved the design for that reason. The original Google search bar. Google Maps, which was ahead of everything for a long, long time. But while they can deal well with concepts, they lack attention to detail.
Google isn't anal. You can tell that some people have it and others don't. Google may have a few people like that in their organization, but they don't have a site-wide dedication to pixel-perfection. They make things that are functional but not beautiful. Their designs don't inspire people, past a point. And that's great if you're making something that doesn't exist yet. The problem is that Facebook exists as a social network, and it's extraordinarily anal. I'd compare Facebook's design to a company like Apple's in terms of depth. Facebook makes missteps more than Apple, but the level of commitment exceeds that of any company I've ever seen.
I'm a pretty outspoken Facebook enthusiast; I've followed the things they've done pretty closely. The things that stand out aren't the major movies, but the minor ones. It was like how when applications all showed on one page, they added the dense set of icons for app navigation. Hover over one and you got a dark dialogue box with white text. Click it and you scrolled down to the application, which further had a dark blue border for several seconds to call attention. Everything was custom-coded - no reliance on previous designs - and worked on every browser.
Three things about that process weren't necessary to work. You didn't need the dialogue box (which was pretty slaved-on to look perfect, since it's been copied since then and every other attempt looks pretty awful). You didn't need the smooth scrolling. You didn't need the border at the end. But the end result wasn't just a link. It was a process. There was an end experience to using this particular thing.
People will accept less-than-perfect for a lot of things. They have extraordinarily high standards, however, for social products. When you talk to people, the process needs to be entirely invisible. If people notice something working, that's a bad sign. Facebook is very, very good for getting out of the way. Look at Facebook's complete featureset at once and you'll realize that most users miss most features, and yet if somebody wants to do something, it's instantly intuitive how they get it done.
This isn't missed by companies. Look at how Disqus blatantly ripped off Facebook's pop-up dialogue design. Not blaming them - it's a good design - but it was still a blatant rip-off. Meanwhile, look at how many people feel the same connection to Google's design. They rip off ideas, like increasing mailbox size or simplifying search pages, but how many actual details stick with people? Not many, because Google's design is bland at best, bad at worst.
Lots and lots and lots of tech people miss this. Partly it's because tech people skim over design more than normal people. Partly it's because tech people have faith in the power of technology alone to fix things. That's not the case. People are very slow to move, and when they do move it won't be with some subtle, slowly-shifting plan of Google's. They will deliberately pick whatever network they move to, if any, and this shift is extremely unlikely.
In 2005 I was working on the quality assurance team for a social network start-up with a pretty neat set of technologies. Part of my goal was to get other people to move off MySpace. The site I was with, Zoints, had a cleaner design, more features, and some parts of it were much more intuitive. People refused to switch. They had friends on MySpace, and they had nothing to gain from switching. Social networks are all about the users, and they were in one basket.
This is important not just as a lesson of how hard it is to make people switch, but of how good Facebook is. Everybody had a MySpace, but they switched over to Facebook anyway. By the time Facebook let high schoolers register, they had 85% of all college students as active users, and half of those were active daily. Now I would suspect it has more than just 85% of all high schoolers registered, and it's leaking down to middle school registration. People at work use it a lot, and as a result entire families are signing up.
Many people here don't ask themselves just how that happened, which is damn shortsighted. I mean, my mother signed up. My grandfather signed up. He comments on my Facebook statuses. My young cousin got an account. And it's not like Twitter, where people want to "tap into a network". It's not like getting a blog. Simply put, Facebook keeps people in contact better than any other application does. It provides an incredible interface. People who know nothing about tech just "get it". They figure out how to write photos and write notes and update statuses and make friends. It's that easy. It's so easy, and so universal, that middle schoolers get them, not just to be cool, but to talk to other kids. Older family members get them to talk to their relatives. My mother currently has a network of 39 friends, including mothers in the neighborhood and friends at work. That's pretty damn impressive.
Centralization means jack shit. Look at Windows Live. Look at how well that worked. Yeah, they have millions of users, but nobody cares. And Windows Live Spaces is extremely well-done. It's one of the better products in the market. Doesn't matter, because even something that's pre-packaged with the computer is harder to use and grasp than Facebook.
Finally: there is no web OS. Get that idea out of your mind, because it won't happen. There are web features that work like things that have traditionally been OS-based, but people say "web OS" like it's a solution to everything. I thought that too, when I was a Windows user, where all the applications were shit. Now I'm on a Mac, and I've realized that iChat is better than Google Talk, and Mail is better than Gmail, and TextEdit is better than Google Docs. Some people might start using these online tools, but only until a better desktop equivalent comes out, and the desktop has incredible advantages. A good designer will be able to make better desktop apps than web equivalents. Look at Mail versus MobileMe (which, for the record, has a better design than anything Google's ever released; Gmail is better than MobileMe's mail in terms of features, but the calendar and address book blow Google's alternatives away, because Google can't design. That's the recurring theme here.)
Google is good at doing a few things. They simplify problems very well. When they don't have a competitor, they do a very good job of consolidating and making good products. The problem is that in the social sphere, they do have a competitor. In email anybody could use anything: I could switch to Gmail and not lose anything I had before. With search I lost nothing by switching to Google. And in both cases, competitors didn't do a thing to catch up until it was too late.
With Facebook, Google's dealing with a company as young and energetic as Google itself. They're up against a competitor that revises and updates and improves even more quickly than Google does with most of their products. It's a competitor that's shifted the social paradigm several times - a competitor that, at this point, is at least two steps ahead of Virb, which is the second-best competitor in the field from a design perspective. Facebook makes Google look like Plaxo: the ugly competitor that nobody loves because it's too goddamn open and not attentive enough on the things that really matter.
Get the goal of pixel perfection out of your mind. It can't be done, because you don't have a clue how each person's browser/system is configured. And it shouldn't be done, because then it's too easy to forget about graceful degradation.
For example, on account of my accessibility issues, Facebook looks like crap and its horizontal scroll bar is even defective. And, no, I'm not changing my configuration just to suit Facebook, or Google, or whatever.
Sorry I'm so testy, but pixel perfection really hits my buttons.
Get the goal of pixel perfection out of your mind. It can't be done, because you don't have a clue how each person's browser/system is configured. And it shouldn't be done, because then it's too easy to forget about graceful degradation.
That's ridiculous. You don't stop striving for perfection just because there's no such thing as absolutely perfect. Are you suggesting designers not develop pixel-by-pixel until the site looks like exactly what they want it to be in their minds? Yeah - that won't work for everybody. At the same time, that's no reason to stop designing as anally and as focused as possible. I hate that mindset: by that standard why design at all? Why not make everything black-on-white, no borders, no margins, just a list of features you can click on?
Either you design, or you don't design. There's no in-between. If you're designing something, you had better be designing with everything you've got, and yes: that means jiggling pixels until they look absolutely perfect. Apple does it, Facebook does it, I do it. Lots of designers do it. There's no reason for you not to do it.
For example, on account of my accessibility issues, Facebook looks like crap and its horizontal scroll bar is even defective. And, no, I'm not changing my configuration just to suit Facebook, or Google, or whatever.
With respect, are you complaining that because you changed your browser's interpretation of the web, something on another site broke? So now you're saying that because of the things that you changed on your computer, it's a fault with Facebook's design. Am I missing something here? Because that sounds pretty snotty.
If you've got accessibility issues, then you're going to see drawbacks when you're using things. Yes, that's the job of the designer to fix, but if they work on fixing it and it's not a completely perfect fix, that's not saying anything bad about their original design.
Sorry I'm so testy, but pixel perfection really hits my buttons.
It's okay. We've all got buttons that get pressed. Mine are pressed when people suggest that it's not worth aiming for perfection. Every great thing that's ever been made had people saying it wasn't worth trying.
> because of the things that you changed on your computer, it's a fault with Facebook's design
You're assuming my computer came out of a box all set for Facebook and your anally perfect site. It didn't. And then I had the gall to do something outrageous to it. I haven't.
You know, a person doesn't need to have major ooga-booga accessibility problems for sites to be "broken." Try fiddling with the width of your browser window. Monitor resolutions are all different, plus some people want the browser window to take up, say, half the width.
Facebook does have a design problem when its horizontal scroll bar is borked.
> We've all got buttons that get pressed. Mine are pressed when people suggest that it's not worth aiming for perfection.
Just don't lose sight of graceful "degradation." Plus it prepares the site for whatever new platforms come along, like the next iPhone.
You're assuming my computer came out of a box all set for Facebook and your anally perfect site. It didn't. And then I had the gall to do something outrageous to it. I haven't.
Hm. I just installed Windows XP out of the box, and Facebook works on IE6. That's as strict a test as need be applied.
Facebook has a fixed width. Is that anything new? Lots of site have fixed-width. Even if you're too narrow, can't you scroll normally?
Just don't lose sight of graceful "degradation." Plus it prepares the site for whatever new platforms come along, like the next iPhone.
There isn't going to be a "next" iPhone. There's the iPhone. The next big thing will not be compared to the iPhone at all.
I don't like making things gracefully degrade past a point. I would never design my web site to work for the iPhone. When it comes to making things iPhone-accessible, I'll make a separate thing. Same to when I design a Facebook app for my site.
If you're testing against IE6 XP that's the worst test you can do.
We test against IE6 + 7 on XP, Firefox on XP, OS X, Safari XP, OS X minimum. With checking Opera and Chrome to make sure. A complicated design can easily render significantly differently and break very easily.
IE 6 is possibly the worst browser you can develop for. Get it working for Firefox and most phones can render it just fine.
I test every major browser, mainly because usually everything works right the first time. I design in a way that doesn't lead to much breakage in any browser but IE 6.
> Hm. I just installed Windows XP out of the box, and Facebook works on IE6. That's as strict a test as need be applied.
I am laughing so hard. You need to put a little icon on the sites you develop saying "Best viewed in Internet Explorer 6," and be sure to post on the front page "Please set your monitor to 1600x1200" (or whatever your out-of-the-box resolution happens to be). Oh, that's right. We're several years past such practices by now. Darn. Yes, I know you work with a few browsers, maybe on some different boxen. But I hope you realize how silly you sound there. :-)
> Facebook has a fixed width. Is that anything new? Lots of site have fixed-width. Even if you're too narrow, can't you scroll normally?
Nope. Not in Firefox 2 on my OS X box. I can horizontal scroll abnormally, but not normally: I can easily scroll with the arrow keys, but scrolling with the mouse requires tremendous aim and coordination. Why? Because a toolbar element which sits perpetually at the bottom of the window partially covers my horizontal scroll bar. (Granted, I haven't glanced at Facebook in a couple weeks. I have no idea how it looks and behaves at this moment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515376)
If I were one of my non-tech-savvy friends, I would say, "I hate Facebook. Why does it do that at the bottom? I can't move it sideways! I need to get my friend to fix my internet for me. I hate computers." But instead I say, "I hate some aspects of CSS, and I'm starting to wish the DIV element had never been invented. DIVs are meaningless when they're put to so many arbitrary uses. Shameful."
I'm not keen on TDD, but a good takeaway from it is, "Only write testable code." When a page consists of a mass of nested DIVs and a tangled cascade of styles, when sizes and positions are controlled by a mishmash of width, height, top, right, bottom, left, border, padding, margin, float, clear, auto, px, pt, em, ex, %, you name it, the page is essentially untestable, undebuggable, and unmodifiable. Try to add an element whose position is fixed to the bottom of the viewport, and you're asking for even more trouble.
Facebook's horizontal scrollbar problem might be remedied merely by changing a margin spec somewhere to a padding, or vice versa, but I pity the poor developer who tries to figure this out. I'm assuming Facebook developers are not so idiotic as to not glance at their work in some different browsers with some different window sizes on some different platforms. But when a borked scrollbar shows up, it's a bad sign, for it means Facebook is creating something too hard to maintain. And ever more people will mutter, "Why does it do this? I hate computers."
When I say "maintain," I mean supporting a larger spectrum of users. A few weeks ago, I read that Facebook has 175M users, of which the fastest-growing segment is 55-year-old women. (Sorry I can't find a link now.) If a site reaches a point where it becomes "necessary" for functioning in civilization, it faces the nearly unimaginable task of supporting "everybody." For starts, try picturing people of assorted abilities on welfare using whatever systems happen to be available at a community center in a church basement. Good luck.
> Google sucks at design.
Today Facebook is hardly necessary to modern civilization, but Google's search might be. "Sucky" design means a web page can be used by a greater variety of people. And the daunting thought of becoming something like an infrastructure utility company probably has Google thinking long and hard about "everybody."
> There isn't going to be a "next" iPhone. There's the iPhone. The next big thing will not be compared to the iPhone at all.
Okay, whatever. I was just trying to dream up something that hasn't been seen yet. Maybe imagine a visual gizmo between a laptop and a handheld, something for which neither the @screen nor @handheld media type is quite suitable.
I think nickblack's original point was lost because you had related points you wanted to make. I think what he was getting at is that Facebook is a good social networking site that's trying to integrate applications. Google has a good set of applications, and they may try to integrate social networking.
They're approaching it from different angles. I don't think Google has to replace Facebook to succeed. If you use a lot of Google applications, you may benefit from those being plugged into a social network. But that social network doesn't have to replace ones you're already a part of (specifically, Facebook).
I also don't understand why, exactly, you think Google has bad design. It has been a pleasure to use every Google application I've tried.
There's an attitude here (I thought nickblack had it, too) that says Google will beat Facebook. I wanted to make the argument that that's not going to happen.
I also don't understand why, exactly, you think Google has bad design. It has been a pleasure to use every Google application I've tried.
Their design is better than a lot of design, but it's not good. I get pleasure from them when they're ahead of the curve: they've never made an app comparable to an existing thing that's a pleasure to use. Google Docs doesn't make text pretty, it has too much clutter, and it makes meaningless design decisions. Gmail has little nitpicky design things that feel like toothaches. (I hate that the messages get put into little blue sandwiches, and I hate the font they use for the writing in between.) The only Google product whose design I really like is their search, and that's because they got it nearly right the first time.
Google don't have to beat Facebook, its Facebook who have to beat Google, who currently have a major advantage. If Google can build their own social graph and have their applications run on top of it - there is less of a reason for users to hang around at Facebook.
Google are defending from a dominant position, which is always easier.
Yahoo still needs to win the integration componant. Flickr, Delicious, my email address book.. they have everything they need, they just have to mash it into one ui. And they are getting there.
No, because nobody uses Yahoo except my grandmother (to play pinochle) and people who call it 'the Yahoo' unironically (to hit on people playing pinochle).
I really like Google's strategy in doing this. They've been rolling out small social based updates for awhile now across all their various applications. Some examples of how it's evolved for me personally:
- In Google Reader, it used to be just me. Now I share stories with (a small handful of) friends. Now, just a few days ago they added commenting features for that. Soon, it will probably be public sharing/comments.
- In Gmail, it used to be just me. Then they added Google Talk into Gmail and the general routine will be receive email from a contract employer, email back and forth, and then we end up talking in Google Chat. I never have to leave Gmail to do all this.
- With Google Maps, I've created a few maps that I've shared with others. When we were going on a trip to Montreal I made a little map of hot spots we should check out. Then, we just loaded it up on the laptop when we were there and we had our own little guide ready for us.
That's just a few examples, but I think what they are doing is very impressive.
Not to forget sharing google documents and sharing google calendars, both of which I regularly do for work. Oh, and then there's the http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ api, designed by google as well.
I call this the social network that is "there when you need it, and not when you dont" which is the best approach to this space. They are surfacing things up when you need them and in a non-obtrusive way.
I have written extensively about this exact phenomenon on my blog a lot recently as I feel that most people do not want a "Social Network" they want solutions to problems - the naming convention is what we all give it after the fact.
I tend to agree, here. I have a Facebook account, but there's nothing I bother to do with it. On the other hand, with Gmail and Talk and Reader, I keep in touch with people I know, share links, etc. in a very seamless way.
Google, obviously, doesn't do everything it tries well, but I've always been impressed with the way they integrate different services. I also have always appreciated the cleanliness of the UI on their products. Even their ads have always been text-based, where many other sites went wrong with giant "flashing text" banners and animation. If Google did build a social networking service, combined with Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Chat, etc. I think they would have a strong hand. Since they just announced targeted advertising based on profiling, gather social data about their users would make perfect sense. I know its been brought up recently why Facebook doesn't do something similar with all the data they have. It sounds as if Google is making moves in that direction, testing the "privacy waters" so to speak.
Surprised? Absolutely not. Google has a team of thousands of engineers, all of which can't possibly be working on it's core products. They'd all be disasters (See Brook's Law). I for one wonder why this sort of "innovation" didn't happen sooner.
As an aside, I sometimes wonder what all the engineers at Google do. Obviously they have an impressive portfolio of products, and I'm sure many internal, and even more just not released yet, but they're constantly hiring. Will it eventually get to a point where half of their engineers are just looking for their keys in play ball pits?
When I left late last year a lot of divisions/projects were in a hiring freeze, don't know if that's still the case but they've definitely kicked the 100-new-people-in-the-lobby-on-Mondays habit.
> I for one wonder why this sort of "innovation" didn't happen sooner
There are a lot of hoops to jump through for this sort of "innovation". A lot. As in, these social features started being really pushed by VPs and the like way back when Facebook Apps launched, and are just now slowly seeing the light.
With the recent launch of Google Voice, google might end up having the best social network data of any social network, since they will essentially act as the phone company, your email provider(Gmail), and your instant messaging service(Gtalk). (i.e. they could know who all your friends were and how often you spoke to each of them) [this is assuming you aren't doing all your messaging through facebook]
I suspect that Orkut is the Google equivalent of the ROKR, the iTunes phone that preceded iPhone. It's a moderately successful trial until Google can really sink its teeth into social networking, whether through its own service or an acquisition or a Twitter/Facebook clone or a new idea entirely.
Orkut was a creation by one of their employees in the early days of social networks. It was experimental, no one had yet determined if social network sites really had any staying power. Up to that point I think Friendster had really been the only one to break any ground.
Orkut also never really got Google's blessing. It wasn't fully integrated into Google Accounts and for the time I was on it, never even had a Google logo on the site.
Not true anymore. You're talking about the state of Orkut from two years ago, maybe longer.
There is integration with Google Accounts, the main page today shows (timidly) Google's logo and they have a good part of their team in Brazil working on it.
Good to hear, I got off of it several years ago. I know it's still thriving in Brazil but haven't looked into it at all except once in the past year I think when I somehow ended up on my Orkut page...
It's a little weirder than that, since Orkut is huge in Brazil and India but unknown in the US. It's kind of the opposite of, say, Google Search which is big in most countries but less than 5% market share in Korea.
Just providing the means to have a profile page is not enough to have a social network anymore. There had to be a continuous stream of information to keep users coming back (buy friendfeed, guys!). But then again Google always had success by keeping things simple...
There is an overall strategy shift at Google. Years ago they talked about how apps were basically the results of 20% time. Each app was an isolated silo, developed in different programming languages, at inconsistent locations and they shared nothing. Google claim that this is what enabled them to be innovative. Some apps were born out of organized teams (like Calendar).
What is happening now is that Google realized that many of these applications duplicated functionality. for eg. contacts in gmail, contacts in calendar etc. They are starting to centralize the common components like the user profile and links to apps. Friends will be next.
The result: a platform, not unlike facebook, except the 'apps' are much better and come from Google. OpenSocial becomes the API to this platform, and they fill it with users from their search market share. The Google API becomes the new web API and they won't have to regret not buying Facebook because by that time they have all their users on an 'unintentional' social network with kick-ass apps.
Schmidt said that Google is now 'search, ads and apps'. Until recently there was no strategy to apps, but now there is: they are taking over and providing the new web OS.