Google falls from grace

> "Facebook has always excelled on targeting. Google has really been trying to catch up in that regard," says Jeremy Kressman, an analyst at eMarketer, a market research firm. Just this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google was looking to give advertisers a way to target existing customers, mimicking a feature already available from Facebook.

I feel like this misses the point of Facebook's strength and Google's (and other competitors') weakness. Facebook is freaking terrible at targeting. Essentially every targeted ad or page suggestion they've ever given me has been laughable. It's not scientific but I've yet to meet anyone who's had a different experience. With Google's products, you either hear the typical annoyance associated with any advertising or you hear "it was freaky that Google knew to show me that!"

The reason Facebook is still huge and Google+ is niche at best is interoperability. Social networks (this style at least) aren't like email providers or cell phone carriers where even if there are a few main competitors, you can't just switch to the one you prefer and expect to keep communicating with people on the "established" service.

Facebook was lucky enough to be "the one" that got your mom to sign up along with your grandma, your boss, your doctor, and your ex. Friendster and Myspace and all of those were big but they never really shed that teen/tween association for a lot of people. Facebook came up when all of the rest of the public was mostly ready to see what this social networking stuff was all about.

And unlike AIM or Hotmail or any of the other big players in chat or email, you can't just use Facebook with a third party client or another compatible service. So unless you get everyone to switch over to something else (or you maintain multiple profiles and sets of contacts) there is little to be gained by using anything but the single, big player on the field.

The relative failure of Google+ has nothing to do with how good Facebook is at targeting (or how good the service is overall). Hell, I would have switched over in a second. Way cleaner and faster mobile app. Nicer website, chat, voice calling, and all the other stuff Facebook has or added to compete with Google.

But even though I sorta hate Facebook's site and I sorta love Google+'s Circles feature, it doesn't matter. Because I'll never convince all of those people to move over and without them, a social network is worthless. It really is a shame because it's as if Facebook is the new email except email isn't a standard and you can only use one provider. It's as if AOL somehow made regular email incompatible back when they were a massive ISP in the US. If you had to have AOL to email other AOL users, who would dare switch?