Why Google+ Will Take Half of the Social Networking Market from Facebook
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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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
>Why is there so much discussion about what might be the success or failure of products/services/companies/etc? It's all noise.
And the answer to that question is quite simple. If there are people out there willing to read it, then there are people out there that are going to write it. Online journalism and blogs have made these types of articles the norm.
maybe because if you invest when everything is definite, you take less risk and get less income?
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.
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.
Bingo!
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.
It was terrible; really. That's why it got pulled, and that's why it didn't get any traction.
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.
Out of my social graph about one-third of my friends are on Google Plus and that number will only keep growing in the future, currently about 3 - 4 a day are moving over from Facebook. It is already at that point that those who I communicate with the most have completely stopped using Facebook and are using just Google+
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
Does it matter that it's the third? This one is pretty compelling. All of my friends are already on it and we're all using it regularly. Whenever I go back to Facebook, it feels old and stagnant (no dynamic updates, no video chat, no noise control, terrible picture quality compared to Picasa, etc.)
> [ need to addict their users ]
Hm, well what's there is already quite enough for me -- but I'm not a heavy Facebook user. It's already been leaked that they're adding games by Florian Rohrweck.
> [ ui better ]
Uh, as an engineer I'd say this is more than just a UI refresh on Buzz or something like that. It's clear huge amounts of work on frontend and backend went into this.
> [ mobile client ]
Brad Horowitz said their iPhone app has been submitted to the approval process. The Android native app is probably one of the most polished Android apps I've ever used. The mobile web-app which has everything but the Huddle was available on day 1.
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.
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
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.
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?"
I have to believe that a company that is that disliked by its customer base is vulnerable.
Google has a social network and a [mobile] operating system.
Who’s going to have the best mobile social user experience?
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.
$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.
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.
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?
They get split 100/0, or 90/10 maybe.