Google+: The Charge of the Like Brigade

I do. I don't believe there's a feature that G+ can add that will overcome the friction of changing social networks from Facebook to G+.

I think Facebook will eventually lose its luster, but its going to be to something completely different then another "Social Network".

Google Play is cool, but social isn't about features. It's about people, and the people are on Facebook. Maybe Google+ isn't designed to supplant Facebook, and maybe it shouldn't be, but it's hard to argue that it wasn't designed at least with Facebook in mind. Like it or not, Facebook directly stores and controls a tremendously large chunk of the data in the world, and to top it off it is arguable that it is this data is most important to people personally, since they spend so much more time with it than they do with, say, Wikipedia. Regardless of whether G+ is a direct Facebook competitor or not, this chunk of information is also off-limits to Google, and the result is that Facebook as an entity poses an existential threat to the entire company, whose job is expressly to make information accessible and searchable. Search isn't going anywhere, but if the most important information is locked away by Zuckerberg and Company, then it may also not be going anywhere especially interesting.

In spite of what I just said, I will grant that you're right when you say that Google+ isn't Facebook. The comparison is almost certain to be unflattering to Google+, and it misses something essential. In particular, regardless of what TC or any other pop-tech journalism firm likes to admit, Google did get one thing profoundly right with Google+. The ability to share blog-style posts in a more freely social setting has catapulted the site to popularity among a nontrivial portion of very prominent academics, not to mention the very influential tech people who use it. Facebook was the minority when it launched to ivy league schools, but one key to their success was that they had the attention of the right people. Google may not be popular, but that doesn't mean they're wrong. Time will tell what happens from here on out, but it will be ironic if the prominent hackers who jump ship because Google is changing ended up jumping ship so that a new set of hackers could build something cool in their place.

While I ended up agreeing with a lot of the points of the original TC article, I think your conclusion ended up being more right, and it is truly unfortunate that Google+ does not get defended as it probably should.

You can say that about any product from any company. With smart players, it's often true, but it's not informative.

My first reaction to GMail was somewhere along the lines ... fuck, this is too good to be true.

The same thing happened when I discovered their search engine. I've been using Altavista and I actually was late to the party. So here I was in an Internet Coffee, frustrated that both Altavista and Yahoo were giving me shitty results, then I saw somebody using Google and I tried it out. The results were visibly much, much better and the interface was fast, simple and effective. And I would tell the same story for Android right now, if it weren't for Apple's iOS that came first.

The article completely misses the point of why Google is Google. They are engineers fixing things. Which is why I don't blame them for trying out their luck with Google+. The problem is indeed that they haven't fixed anything in Google+.

What really worries me is that Google is losing their culture of tinkering, their playfulness. They will soon fail to capture new markets, to further innovate, then they'll become evil, using their amassed wealth and influence to crush competition and to break standards.

Perhaps more importantly G+ has eroded user trust of Google because it made people come to grips with the amount of data Google has about them in a way they could before just not think about.

And perhaps most importantly, Google has finite eng and user experience resources and instead of them being devoted to Google's many other products (many of which are not finished or ready for go-time with enterprise customers), they were sucked into the G+ black hole because it was the hot new thing. Too bad most of their work was in vain...

Yeah, especially since _Apple_ was pointed out as the opposite - you know, that company the invented the smart phone, and the mp3 player, and the gui, and the mouse…

Even as somebody who could quite credibly be accused of "drinking the Steve Jobs Kool Aid", I laughed out loud at that.

This is a really good point. As far back as 1996[1], Steve Jobs was saying Apple couldn't win by being a little better than Microsoft/Dell. They had to be 10 times better.

The original Google was one of those 10x improvements over the status quo. +1 seems very me-too.

If I were Google, I would try to buy Github. They are quietly creating a new kind of social network around code and hacker culture. Google is much better at code than social, and with Github they can do certain things 10x better than Facebook.

[1] This interview of Jobs by Terry Gross is remarkable. http://www.npr.org/2011/10/06/141115121/steve-jobs-computer-... The consumer Internet was still a very new thing and he correctly described where it was going and what Apple might do if he were at the helm (he had not rejoined Apple yet).

Yes, when you are looking for "cheap red shoes" just right now, Google AdWords is wonderful. But when you are trying to sell a product that the customer doesn't know they want, but you know they do based on who they are, Facebook Ads blows Google AdWords out of the water. Different tools for different usage. It's what TV ads and branding has been all about. Who knows, soon Google may be a niche advertiser similar to late night shopping channels. I'd hate that.

(You can read a longer version of my experience here: http://blog.foundrs.com/2011/04/01/sell-your-google-stock-li...)

You can +1 things all over the web and your friends will only know about it if you actively share the +1 on your stream.