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Comment by lachlanj | Hacker News Reader

Google+ looks amazing but if you think Facebook won't have these features copied within six months you are wrong. In particular the circles features which seems like the most compelling feature.

Also the "average" person won't maintain 2 social profiles and will gravitate to where the users already are. If Google wants to compete in social it's need to do more than just "sharing". They must have features that people need to use. These features may come. I don't know what that is? Deep personalized search integration? Beat Facebook to their inevitable Skype/video integration? time will tell.

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Also the "average" person won't maintain 2 social profiles and will gravitate to where the users already are.

The MySpace to Facebook transition shows that exactly this happened. I was in high school at the time, and I definitely remember people mentioning having both a MySpace and Facebook account, and wanting to get people to switch over to Facebook. I don't mean "tech people", I mean normal folk.

As for compelling features, I think Circles is a killer. When your relatives are on Facebook, a good portion of your personality has to leave Facebook. You have to think about what you're going to say, and generally stick to the blandest possible expression of who you are. If Google+ enables people to say what they want to who they want, it will be a hit.

Facebook already has the exact same functionality in friend lists. They're only a small ui tweak away from parity in that respect. As for the drag and drop into circles, it's cute but realistically it's not a big part of day to day use.

Short term there may be some cross over, as with MySpace and Facebook, but long term the average person will only maintain one personal "social" profile ie I don't include linkedin(business) or Twitter(broadcast/news) as a personal social profile (I know me not including twitter as social is asking for trouble but its a different kind of beast). MySpace is effectively dead after being sold today for a 10th of the price News Corp bought it for.

Could Facebook really scale a massive group video-chat service to all (or even half) of its users in that timeframe? This might be advantage an (initially) smaller socially network has over a big one - highly resource-intensive things like videochat and real-time video watching are more feasible.

Using a partnership with Skype it could definitely achieve this. Whether that partnership would ever happen is debatable.

Features don't make the social network; customs do. FaceBook copied Twitter with its status messages in Twitter's infancy, and yet they didn't manage to kill Twitter.

I still dunno if Google+ will be a success, but if it is, I suspect it will be more due to the actions of early adopters than to Google.

Well that certainly took less than 6 months - http://www.facebook.com/videocalling

Any guesses as to how long it takes for Facebook to copy G+ circles?

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