How Mark Zuckerberg Led Facebook’s War on Google Plus
vanityfair.com
vanityfair.com
The lockdown thing is interesting, but you have to wade through this blathering, fawning, puff-piece nonsense. There are many more such gag-inducing sections in this piece. Good luck.
I guess it's just "gotta write a story....gotta make a dollar...gotta get some ad impressions" or whatever, but..really..does anyone actually give a shit?
I don't like Android, and I am not using it.
But I have to use facebook because some real life events that I should attend are organized on Facebook.
Similarly WhatsApp. I give it no permissions, which makes it a little awkward as I have to memorize (or lookup) phone numbers; But I have missed several important announcements when I wasn't on WhatsApp.
Try harder next time.
I'd almost pay money to read your review of a Franzen or DFW book.
It's crap writing, on style, viewpoint, and logic.
1. Mark Zuckerberg is the Messiah, albeit with human traits of failure. (Makes a messiah more relatable)
2. Google pooh poohs Facebook
3. Google sits up and takes notice as Facebook's users pick up and Vic Gundotra's kids and their friends tell Vic that Facebook is where they are at and Vic goes to Larry Page and whispers warnings in his ears.
4. Larry bestows knighthood on Vic to wage war on Facebook.
5. Vic looks at the Google Landscape and thinks "I bet I can get 400 million users by bombarding Google properties with G+ buttons but that would be too easy so I am going to only allow people with invites to become users. Come on I need a challenge!!"
6. Zuckerberg looks at G+ and Google's search users and thinks "Holy God in Heaven! My flock is under attack"
7. Zuckerberg ushers his flock into the pen and closes the gates.
8. The flock sits in the pen and does what they had been doing though a little more carefully now.
9. Vic looks at the barren landscape of G+ and thinks "There's no one here. I better put cardboard cutouts of people here so Larry doesn't revoke my knighthood"
10. Mark's flock looks at the cutouts and laughs their asses off. They drink some more Kool Aid.
11. G+ is burned to the ground by all the bombardment Vic did and Vic tucks tail and leaves.
12. Mark opens the gates of the pen and his flock are let out and they rejoice. The author of this article thinks Mark is a genius for herding all his flock into the pen and hunkering down.
13. "That's how you "lead" wars, bitch", proclaims the Messiah.
sarcasm
The "social must be everything" Mantra that Google was chanting then was annoying and ridiculous. But part of the situation was the company didn't want to just create a useful service for people but rather wanted to impose a situation where people's identities could be monetized by Google.
Facebook has had trouble monetizing their product and I suspect they're safe because every company with the resources to produce a UI and service as useful as Facebook is going to want have such a service impose more conditions, be oriented towards quicker monetization, etc.
Even MySpace could have persisted if they'd focused on providing things Facebook didn't - but no one wanted to extend credit to them to do and creating this stuff apparently costs a lot of money for a significant amount of time.
But G+ seemed to push the strain quite high.
2. Yes, Zuckerberg managed to avoid technical errors and tarpits, mostly, to get there.
3. No, the "Lockdown" thing had little to do with it. If anything it may well have been counterproductive.
4. God what a horribly written, horribly analysed piece of glurge this is.
5. Harvard.
6. Google shot themselves in the foot. Repeatedly. With tremendous technical ability. With tremendous effect. Taking a service I wanted to like, wanted to find useful, and wanted to support, and uttershly gobshiting it.
Put the blame squarely at the feet of Vic Gundotra. And more squarely: at the feet of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt. The rot does straight to the top. All four men did a tremendous disservice to Google, torpedoed massive amounts of brand equity and consumer trust, and have done very, very, very little to redeem it.
I've dug at G+, critiqued it, analysed it, and compared it with other alternatives. All in the hopes of finding a decent goddamned place for intelligent conversation online.
Hell if I know where it's at.
(HN is a small piece, but only a small piece, and not without its own major faults.)
More: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/SCqMujFZ...
A minor dig but this is the sort of subtle male-centric POV that should be filtered out of tech journalism. Straight women use Facebook too, check out profiles. What's more, they constitute 4/5ths of Vanity Fair's readership.[1] This is speaking to women, subtly telling them that tech is mainly tools for guys.
Comes up all the time in other contexts. Like I was watching Tinker Bell the other day, and it's basically 100% femmy fairy girls EXCEPT they made the nerdy techy builder characters boys. I'm like, come on...
[1] http://www.condenast.com/brands/vanity-fair/media-kit/print
When G+ came out Facebook was pretty damn popular amongst my peers and younger friends and colleagues. G+ had some interest I'll grant you but the big question to everyone I know was 'Why? I have Facebook.' Despite that I and a lot of friends signed up. The problem was that Google's social network felt like a geeky waste land. Like a place where you post things that you don't care if anyone else sees.
Pity because from what I understand their photos app has uncanny facial recognition and auto tagging capabilities. Their email clearly is solid. Hangouts is also pretty damn good. Google have so much opportunity in the social space if they could tie all these services together in a compelling way but they really seem to be missing some key ingredients - thoughtful leadership perhaps?
The real problem is network effect: Most people were already on Facebook, and maintaining two presences (FB and G+) was a chore. So most people kept to FB. Everyone I know kept their main profile on FB, and had a "professional" or "interest-based" profile on G+, which naturally saw about 10% or less activity.
[1] https://medium.com/@6StringMerc/zuckermandias-d1fa241c4d56#....
The point of the poem is akin to "the bigger they are the harder they fall" if you will.
Just like Microsoft's terrible tablets weren't done in by any other tablet maker, and were cursed with enough problems to get a cold shoulder at the cash register.
I don't even use Facebook, but it's pretty obvious that it's purpose built to do specific things, and does them well, if that's what your Jonesing for.
Honest question: how was this obvious?
It was a product mandated for the sake of a company's bucket list at best. To earn a gold star for trying. To mark off a checkbox.
The whole thing reeked of groupthink, from a mile away. Censored behavior. Courting celebrities. Requiring real names. Activities restrained by pretense. It stank of corporate influence, of lunchtime business meetings, of shareholder concern. Poochie the dog, rastafied by 10% or so.
Nothing about it felt natural. Everyone has to wear clothes. No cursing please. Place your cigarette in the appropriate receptacle.
Worse still, all things were clearly designed to funnel back into some other thing at Google that was more impotant to the bottom line. Endorsements, trending interests, who's reading what, written by who, and so forth.
It wasn't designed to tickle the user. None of that is why people come to the internet and keep coming back. Not regular people.
You could tell that the people invloved in crafting the reason for Google Plus' existence were people who pay their taxes. Who drive safely, even if they drive expensive cars. Who spend their lives trapped inside a ribbed condom. Yeah, it's a condom, but it's a ribbed condom. So much better!
Facebook is also guilty of many of these sins, but it's what they do, it's ALL they do, and they don't get in the way of people behaving badly, or at least not in ways that would preclude them from just trying to have fun on a website they don't actually need to use. And that's where Google really crossed the line, by trying to needle people into jumping on the Google Plus bandwagon, and then by telling them to sit all proper and cross-legged too.
Google+ didn't lose because Facebook used any particular counter-attack. It lost because it basically set out to copy Facebook, which constituted an attack where Facebook was strongest; why would anyone use it when they could use the original, which had more people on it? Google should have tried doing something different. Maybe drop the real names policy, maybe allow open programmatic access, I don't know enough about the domain to be able to say for sure exactly what, but they needed to provide some reason for at least some percentage of users to switch.
I mean, they absolutely cannot. We have a term for that; it's called 'kidnapping'.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
I thought it was the other way around - circles were based on a research by a guy from Google, who left later for Facebook and they built similar feature.
http://mashable.com/2009/10/09/create-facebook-friend-lists/
That said, I pretty much agree with you. I've lost my patience for magazine-style journalism.
These were the days when the people coming to Facebook in 2008, 2009 were a bit fed up by it and wanted to try something else with hosting pictures, events etc. So they actually were the most interested in trying in out, hey it was a Google product and everyone loved Gmail. But Google screwed up and placed an invite system.
I don't know if they weren't prepared for the scale or wanted to copy Gmail (it worked once, amirite!) or the Facebook being exclusive at their beginning.
The times were different though and if you slam the door before someone eager to try out your stuff, guess what, he won't come back. So after couple months when the invites were a bit more reachable, the initial interest was wasted and left an aftertaste in people.
And you don't want that.
"Hey here is an invite to this thing that none of your friends can get on"
You could give the users ownership of the multibillion dollar platform whose monetary value only exists because of its users.
I'm not saying FB owes me anything, but niether does YouTube who manages a revenue sharing program with its content creators (users). Btw those users didn't create YouTube, run their servers, write the code, etc...
Your salary/equity/etc. vs. your value on your personal life either make overtime worth it or not.
Precisely, in a way.
I really encourage you to find a way to view your work that lets you love it, or do something else.
I even know an airline captain who complains endlessly, and that's still a dream job for most kids.
In those circumstances the coping mechanism is to desensitise and decouple so as to treat those 40 hours as simply an enabler for the other 128.
"Love what you do" is an employer tactic to maximize value and minimize cost of their employees hoping they'll work extra for passion instead of more money.
Unless you have substantial equity it's not your company. Don't be passionate about a profit, control, or ownership you were very intentionally cut from.
In this case the employer desires to run their company without paying you or dealing with you because they don't want you there. But as of today, they need you. If tomorrow they decide they don't, you'll be packing your boxes. Remember that.
If you enter into a work relationship where you are nice then you open yourself up for abuse and favors. People stop respecting your time and ideas and you slip into the role of company bitch. Set boundaries and never hesitate to leave if things are not in your favor.
It took 150 years of worker struggle to get a minimum wage, a civil war to get rid of slavery, and decades of violence to get rid of child labor. You are a worker. Remember what you are selling to the employer. Don't foolishly give away your labor capital. Maximize your own profit and minimize your own cost.
However, if you own a commensurate share, then disregard all of this as it doesn't apply.
Most jobs aren't like that, though, and no matter how much you love something you eventually get tired of it.
People are more careful with expensive things and treat them better.
You aren't working at the leisurely indiscretion of the company.
You become a more efficient, effective, objective, focused and self-directed employee when you focus on and realize your cost/value proposition.
Of course if you were working for a foundation or charity then sure... This doesn't apply.
But for a few years it was great.
Assuming you're at a job where you're being compensated in line with your abilities, you can either choose to view what you do as burdensome labor, or as a fun challenge. The only difference between these two views is that one will make you depressed, and the other will make you happy. How do you want to feel?
Not the mention the whole YouTube users being constantly harassed to input their real name which gave G+ an even worse taste in their mouths.
And Google isn't just any competitor. This was back in the days when Google could do no wrong. They conquered the world in search. They conquered the world in email. They were starting to conquer the world in mobile. They had some of the best engineering talent in the world. And they were now pointing all their guns at Facebook. I can certainly imagine why Zuck was shitting bricks. Kudos to him for pulling out a win.
It's one thing to have my search history. It's another to have my search history, identity, and email.
I resisted the pull of Gmail for a long time. Yes, I created an account (to forstall others from doing so, and, oddly, a highly distinctive name proved taken in multiple iterations, or at least unavailable, when I tried registering it). I've simply moved to using email very little.
G+ put the stink in though. I really wanted to like the service. I used it early on, and still do. I wanted it to be the anti- Facebook (which I do not use, or trust).
But multiple from the top decisions made, and still make it, exceptionally difficult to like. Sadly, there's little better (and I've looked).
It absolutely was, but Facebook didn't so much as win the war, whereas it was Google who shot themselves in the foot and lost. All they had to do was not be Facebook and they would have won, but they had a lot of missteps. Real name, and google-wide single sign-on caused immediate hesitation and started the fall.
I know that I certainly did, and in fact for awhile my Facebook image was something along the lines of, 'I've left for G+!' Sadly, not many folks made the transition, and I'm back.
Funny timing on this story — I've recently been reading some of the Indie Web Camp stuff, and discovered that diaspora came out in 2010. It seems like just yesterday! Even back then we were worried about a Facebook monoculture, and hopeful in competitors.
Google's main assault couldn't break Facebook; diaspora couldn't either. I don't know what will, and that worries me.
All twelve of you?
I mean, I respect the effort, but people by and large aren't dissatisfied, while those who are dissatisfied aren't dissatisfied in such a way that makes them receptive to "nobody else is here, but you should be" services.