FB’s Former CTO Says It Would Take Two Years For ~250 People To Build A Clone

If one applies Brooks Law then it could be said that a team of 20 Elite hackers could build it in half the time. Also if you consider how much infrastructure is already in place for G+ (Accounts, Advertising, Services as Google Docs, Picassa, etc.) (which is obviously topic of this article) and that beyond front-end most of the work that probably had to be done was building circles and integrating backend infrastructure.

Yes my analysis is silly - but not any sillier than that of the original author (Lets hope Google has 500 people working on it?).

But just to participate in senseless speculation I foresee that Google will release development API's by November 2011. And that by summer 2012 G+ will be completely integrated into whole Google ecosystem, offering services that will completely dwarf what FB has to offer.

Shameless Plug: http://www.janezstupar.com/the-facebook-dilemma

15 people + 1 year -- for a significantly better version

People always underestimate a good, small team with the right tools.

You dont want build a clone anyway. What you want is a product that does something similar, while being more enjoyable to use.

Eliminating half the dev hours for trial and error (churn)?! Do they realize that most of software development is not the actual coding time? Having an EXACT and detailed requirements and UI layout is way more than 50% of the work.

Flagged, as per the guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."

This post adds nothing beyond the original thread on quora.

Well, thats the honest and straightforward way of calculating, but from a competitor standpoint, you wouldn't want to match feature to feature and then try to compete. You'd attack by taking over the disgruntled users first, and Google has done that well with Circles, and Privacy. Google has its own issues with acting like a drunken sailer kicking off people at whim. But I doubt it'd take 2 years - if G+ managers to build engagement and retention, they are good to go - but honestly, thats a battle for Google.