Considering they had to have known about G+ for a while before it launched, you would think they would really hit something out of the park in terms of competitive features. These are all pretty lackluster, imho.
FB's announcement today has spent a lot of time talking about how much work it was to implement...
It's got to be a huge kick in the pants to them. I kind of feel bad for them.
Facebook is now the ubiquitous video chat social network, built on Skype. Google+ is Circles on your Gmail. Everything else you say requires some level of convincing.
Remember that this video chat is not a web page. It's a Microsoft (and Apple? I don't know) desktop application that integrates into their web page.
I'm suggesting that Facebook is showing their alliance to Microsoft by ignoring some other OSs and launching Microsoft-powered features. If you include video chat as an integral part of Facebook, then you can no longer call Facebook a web site.
Pretty much all of the really useful features are also big privacy violators, and with the uncertainty around how the public views social networking privacy, FB is smart to wait and let Google make the first move.
Whichever, G+ or FB, manages to capture the buzz of "hangouts with famous people" will probably take the current round. This to me is the iteration of one of Twitter's big wins; the chance to rub shoulders with "stars".
For me, and I suspect most here, such things don't really matter. I'll stay with FB as long as most of my friends are there and it works reasonably well.
I sent my wife the intro link for Google+ when they launched and she couldn't even be bothered to check it out. Why? Because everyone she knows is on facebook.
If her friends move, then she'll move. It'll probably annoy her to have to switch too.
And every of her friends will move if the other friends move, etc. But in reality, it is enough if only one of her friends, the most influential one moves, and then all the worker bees will follow.
> Because everyone she knows is on facebook.
But why is everyone on facebook in the first place? Because one of them, the group leader, the early adopter, the trend setter, decided first, then the rest passively followed. If the trend setter again decides to go G+, the effort to move off Facebook will be less then losing the queen bee, so they will follow again.
I'm wondering what made the group leaders adopt? Was it features? Trendy name and logo? Did it seem like the hip thing to do? Exclusivity / scarcity?
Older video: "Merchants of Cool" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/
Or look at a Goog search "marketing trendsetters | "trend-setter"
Lots of noise. The Merchants of Cool is a good relevant watch.
From a technical implementation perspective maybe Hangout is better. However, from a social networking perspective 3/4 of a billion Skype users is clearly better. And from a marketing perspective, giving Skype users worldwide a reason to choose Facebook over competing products is brilliant.
At the same time, when Buzz came out, it was even faster and cleaner. Just not placed in the right context. There must have been some lessons and technology learned from Buzz.
1) The average person knows more people on Facebook, then people with a Gmail account.
2) You, and your other geeky friends live in Gmail. The rest of the world lives inside Facebook.
For now.
To me, there's exactly one compelling thing about Facebook: It illustrated that normal humans will join and use a social network.
Beyond that, I don't see any reason why their adoption patterns will differ from those we've already seen with other humans on other "social" web properties (Hi Livejournal/Facethejury/Friendster et al!). Which is to say, the enthusiastic folks eventually get those who joined begrudgingly involved, everyone has fun for a while, then everyone gets bored and moves on.
It's not as if nerds who have SRS PRIVACY CONCERNZ and talk about things like data portability are the only people growing weary of Facebook. An approximate majority of the musicians/DJs/artists I know in real life and on the internet say they hate Facebook but maintain an account for promotional purposes. But they all seem to have really warmed up to Twitter. (Specifically, most in the music crowd seem to have adopted a combination of Twitter and Soundcloud as their primary internet residencies, filling the void where MySpace once resided.)
To assume that Facebook will remain the social network of note just because they're Facebook, or just because they got there first (sort of) seems naïve.
The network effect will be the primary driver of where we all—geeks and normies alike—end up next. Facebook doesn't really have any control over that. And we've seen that the network effect can linger even after the product has effectively failed (Hi MySpace!), so having the network now may not be a reliable indicator that they'll keep it, even in the very near term.
And that leaves the product. Which is fine, I guess. Not that bad, not that great. But when Google announces their first real crack at a genuine social network and it has features no one's even talked about yet, and it's cooked directly into their mobile platform running on about 180 Mm devices worldwide [1][2], Facebook's "awesome" reply, "We've got video chat now," falls flat. To me at least.
[1] http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1622614 [2] Android/Google+ and some of the new iOS 5 features along with Apple's Twitter partnership have me semi-convinced that we're moving towards the transparent social network, where membership has much more to do with which smartphone you buy than anything else. I predict that in a competition with Google and Apple/Twitter, Microsoft/Facebook will turn out to be also-rans. Also, poor RIM.
These never reached the audience Facebook has today. 750M users and growing, FB won social networking. Game over.
It's not as if nerds who have SRS PRIVACY CONCERNZ and talk about things like data portability are the only people growing weary of Facebook.
I guarantee you this is a very tiny portion. I live with someone who spends lots of time on FB ("Oh, look at this pictures from XYZ"). They don't even know there is a discussion going around privacy.
To assume that Facebook will remain the social network of note just because they're Facebook, or just because they got there first (sort of) seems naïve.
It will just as Microsoft has dominated the OS space. Another desktop OS is not going to kill MSFT, but maybe mobile will. Same for FB, it will take a different experience to get people to stop spending as much time on the site. Something like Instagram or With with a few added features/mechanisms.
I'm acquainted with hundreds of people like your roommate, and I'm aware that normal people don't give a shit about our geeky critiques of Facebook. What I was trying to communicate is that they likely won't bail on Facebook for those reasons, but they might because there are too many annoying people on Fb, or they don't want to get Faceskyped by their mom, or something that's more interesting or lower friction comes along, or other people move for a variety of reasons and they just follow.
FB won social networking. Game over.
I hate to put it this way, but what are you doing on HN? Seriously. I thought we'd all read The Innovator's Dillema. Nobody wins anything for long, the game's never over. That's sort of the point of capitalism.
I apologize if I offended you, Ryan. All I am asking for is for an example of one company that had reach the sort of mass FB has (coupled with a total dominance in its vertical)and ended up loosing to a competitor. Enlighten me.
Youngsters today and the lack of history being taught in schools. History is full of winners, who after a period of time became losers (or at least not the same level of winning).
Yes. Your neighbor's mama was never on Myspace, ICQ, AIM, YIM, MSN, and chances are she is not on Gmail video chatting.
If that's underachieving, sign me up.
You are correct, though. I, along with most people who use facebook, haven't had to do any deeper platform/api integration.
- Repeated posts in the news feed. The first ~10 posts or so in the news feed are repeated as you scroll down.
- In the news feed, if I see and play a video, it plays. Great. If I continue going down the feed and then click on a photo, it goes into the "theater" mode, and for some obscure reason, it plays the video again (except I cannot see it; I can only hear it). The only way to stop it is to exit theater mode. This keeps happening over and over again every time I enter theater mode. I am then forced to refresh the entire page if I want to see some pictures without distracting noise in the background.
These are just a couple examples; there are many more. After talking to some friends, it seems I'm not the only one experiencing them. Now, nobody's perfect. It's OK if these bugs got into production for a few days or even weeks before getting fixed. But it's been months now... For a company full of brilliant engineers, that is unacceptable.
(Now the Facebook iPhone app is really buggy, I will give you that.)