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Comment by yalogin | Hacker News Reader

Leaving the emotion of Google+ being awesome out - what is preventing facebook from copying this? They have a huge number of users who are not going to leave overnight. Facebook we all know can turn on a dime to get products/features out. If these features are really that sought after and good they could just implement them and give it to their users. Why won't that work?

Also facebook is a platform as much as a social network. People play games on there probably more than post pictures or tag their friends. That is what sustained facebook and made them utterly dominant. That is not going to change with G+.

I agree G+ is a good service but why is everyone making the grave ready for facebook?

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The biggest problem is that Facebook is already a known quantity. As mentioned elsewhere, Lists and Groups can replicate most of the Circled functionality---but nobody uses them. They're not well-known, and users aren't about to start using them, even if Facebook reworks themselves: people are accustomed to sharing with everyone on Facebook.

Google+ has positioned and designed itself for Circles, and has firmly shoved Circles into everyone's skull. I think it's more of a branding thing than a technical difficulty thing at this point.

Asynchronous or one-way sharing is fundamentally incompatible with the current Facebook friends model. They'd have to rework a lot of the privacy code. Probably all of it, actually.

It would also be a major UX shift to bring Lists back to the foreground and make it a part of every interaction a la circles. And if they did, it would be hard to do it without offending existing users.

Facebook also may have big datacenters but perhaps not currently architected to handle videochatting at the volume that Hangouts require. Google has a one-up on them there since they've offered free video chatting for years, and they also have gotten many people to already install the Voice and Video plugin by offering free phone calls in GMail for the past two years. That plugin is key to a good videochatting UX in a browser (Flash by itself has some technical and UX problems with webcam access).

Facebook has a recent history of bad products. Their last hit was the Like button and how long ago was that now?

Not to get into an argument but when was the last time Google had a hit? All I am saying is the tech crowd is probably reacting to this more based on their dislike of facebook and love for google and not taking an objective/business view of things.

Probably Google Instant, less than a year ago.

http://searchengineland.com/how-to-put-the-facebook-like-but...

May 2010?

and as for your reply downthread about Google Instant being a hit, how much of Google Instant being a hit is due to it being the default behavior of Google now, and would anyone actually miss it if it were gone?

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