Why Google+ will succeed wildly. At first. | Hacker News Reader

Why Google+ will succeed wildly. At first.

goodexperience.com

6 pointsjoshuacc5 comments

Just because you can't do it now, doesn't mean you won't use it if you could.

"If you look at how people use their horses, the majority of them don't go over 15mph."

We'll see what happens with G+ vs. Facebook. I suspect there will be feature list battle coming up. Aside from patents, there isn't much stopping Facebook and Google from stealing each other's improvements.

Right on the money. Filtering who reads your messages isn't a pain point, nor does it appeal to our psychological senses. It's just a technical feature... a feature that only a software engineer would obsess about, and turn into a full-fledged product. Sorta like "Color".

Filtering IS a pain point if you have very different audiences amongst your facebook 'friends', like real friends vs co-workers vs parents. Not having filtering may prevent you from making a personal post that would be funny to your friends but crude to others. The author asks how many people want fewer readers of their posts, but for non-technical users, number of readers isn't a concern at all. Publishing something embarrassing then remembering your grandmother is now a friend, on the other hand, is an annoying concern.

There's still a question, though, of whether people will think it's worth the effort to categorize all their contacts. I'm not sure how many will bother.

If Google+ said "here's your list of several hundred contacts, now categorize them" I would never get around to it.

But what they mainly present me with is three contacts at a time, always visible, and it just takes a couple clicks to categorize one. Then I get to see who pops up next. Every time I go on g+ I do a few of them without really thinking about it. And if you saw my hard disk you'd see I'm not much for organizing at all, generally.

It's a pain point if you have 1000 of friends. Right now, that's not the case if you use Google+. So Google+ solves a pain point only if they have traction, but if their main selling point is solving filtering.. then traction will be hard to get. It's a chicken and egg problem. It's like investing your money. It's pointless to even talk about it if you're in debt. Get out of debt first, then worry about investing.

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