Why Google + Will Win (opens in new tab)

Time and time again we see Google make the same mistakes. They are tone-deaf as to why Facebook is successful.

Sure, circles will get plenty of usage in the Bay Area, where the people who built it probably felt if only they could build this one extra feature then people would come flocking to them away from Facebook. But this misses the point.

Nobody on Facebook, other than techno-geeks, have been clamoring for this. Are you the type of person who would consider deleting your Facebook account? You're probably also the type of person that will be interested in Circles. But, you also are the type of person that, unlike 99.99% of the rest of the population, can comprehend having a social life without Facebook being the glue.

Facebook is cool. Facebook gets people laid and lets you participate in more debauchery online once you have stumbled home drunk from the bar. It doesn't feel like a hospital room or a bathroom, it feels like a party.

If Google wants a chance to usurp Facebook's dominance, it needs to do so under a different brand. Repeat after me: the Google brand will never be as cool as Facebook.

More importantly though, it needs to figure out what Facebook is missing. No, Circles are not what Facebook is missing. There's certainly something that Facebook is missing, that the cool kids would want, but odds are whatever it is wouldn't pass the smell test of the type of things Google would consider building.

Imagine you are at a party. It's fun, the music is good, there is booze, and the people are good looking. What's missing? Google's response would be: "The music is hard to hear, we should upgrade the speakers." Facebook's response would be: "cocaine."

The reason Facebook has come up to where they are, after all, stems from the big brass balls they've had for pushing up against the standards of privacy and even decency held by society today, something Google has never and will never be able to (or should want to) do in return. This is why Google will keep fumbling around trying to "out-innovate" Facebook, and will fail again and again in spectacular ways. It's sad, but endearing.

You know, if all these different social networks just worked towards an open, federated protocol, we wouldn't have to play this game every few years.

My reason why Google+ will fail. No one but the technorati will care.

(this sounds snarky but I'm quite serious)

Everyone seems to think Circles is a game changer, I'm not so sure. While it seems like a considerable improvement over managing lists in Facebook, I really don't believe that people like my mom really care enough for this to combat the network effect that Facebook already has.

Similarly this is the only thing Facebook does. How long will it take them to steal any innovative interface ideas G+ has? Can Google really stay ahead of Facebook in this space?

The design of Google+ is nice, but it has its issues. For one, how do I figure out which of these people is my girlfriend? http://i.imgur.com/V843H.png

Reason why none of that matters now: Zynga's crack-like games.

2008: You sign up for Facebook and are immediately bored. Then you discover pokes and inane surveys, and have some fun once a few friends are signed up.

2011: Facebook entertainment has become Zynga's click-slave crack-code, and that's what brings in the 'normals'.

Google+ is where Facebook was in 2008, but without the fun.

These are the first questions I had upon signing up to Google+, and to my knowledge they are unanswered:

* Where are my friends?

* How do I bring over my contacts from Facebook? (the Facebook --> Yahoo --> Google+ thing was ridiculous)

* What can I do for fun?

Google+ has exactly the same problem that almost every other Google product has had: its value isn't immediately apparent. It's amazingly opaque for a product that people hope will dethrone Facebook. Add to that the fact that there are none of the 'fun' things that Facebook has, and I fail to see how this is any sort of competition.

> If you already have a gmail account, you will soon have a G+ account.

But what is the penetration of Gmail? 200 million users? Every one of them could fully embrace Google+ and they still wouldn't have 1/4 of the userbase of Facebook.

For this reason I think point #4 should have been listed:

4. Android - Nearly every Android phone owner ends up with a Google account and, we can expect, in the near future that will also mean having the Google+ app prominently positioned and well integrated. At 500k handsets a day this growth rate alone will give Google+ a huge leg up.

"In the beginning there was myspace" - not really. In the beginning, there was LiveJournal. And Friendster.

Facebook already has circles. They're called friend lists. Adding UI sugar to make circles (if people actually wanted them) would be nearly trivial. For instance:

http://www.circlehack.com/

My experience with G+ is a lot like Google Wave. It was fun for 20 minutes, then the novelty wore off and I found it cumbersome. For example Circles... my father has 3 e-mail addresses, and I need to add them ALL to the Family circle, thus duplicating him 3 times.

With facebook, individuals are one-to-one, but on G+ it is possible for them to be one-to-many.

As much as I hate to say, I'd rather use what I already have, and what all my friends have... facebook.

Sums it all up pretty well. The solution for Facebook is probably what Facebook will do anyway. But it won't work. You can't just patch up disruption onto your old technology/business model. You have to start from scratch to compete, and that's something Facebook can do, which is the beauty of all disruptions.

I know Google+ doesn't exactly look like a disruptive innovation at first sight, but more like a direct competitor to Facebook, but if Circles re-defines the game, then that pretty much means it's a disruption and it will take the path of that all disruptive innovations take, which is to replace the incumbent (gradually).

The cool argument is the wrong way to go with why Google+ will fail. The real value that Facebook provides is information. Free and open information about anyone and while some people view this as an invasion of privacy they are kidding themselves. The reason Facebook has become so addictive is because of the things you can find out about people, different people who aren't necessarily your friends. I understand that people have this idea that they only want to share things with their friends and there is an easy and simple way to do that on Facebook, only add your friends. In reality we don't want to or really we don't mind that people who aren't our closest friends know the things about us we put on Facebook. Facebook's lack of "privacy" is its most valuable asset not only to their own business model but to their user base as well. As someone in another comment said its the college kids that push the adoption of sites like this and from my own perspective and that of people I know, Facebook's privacy issues have never been the big deal they are portrayed as by the media. Google+ is shooting themselves in the foot by focusing on creating "real friendships" and closed information circles because in reality the reason many people like Facebook is because of the openness it inspires.

A feature that I've seen a lot of the media cover as well, Hangouts, is one that while useful in certain situations I think displays how Google is missing the overall concept of social networking. Hangouts is a great feature if you're in a pinch and need to for some reason host a multi-person video chat but so is oovoo, another group video chatting fad. Its a feature that while nice is not a hook for many people and really doesn't relate to the overall theme of social networking. Social networking's goal is not to create the most realistic online portrayal of your life. It's really, from the perspective of the company, to make managing your network of friends easier and make connecting with them easier and more efficient. Video chatting is not the most efficient way to manage these relationships and is not a unique way to conduct it either as there are many video chatting services that are widely adopted such as Skype. While video is still an important part of our lives with streaming content and live broadcasts, in the sense of the video chatting it is more closely relatable to the phone call which we all know is not favored today like the text message. Which should tell Google something, we as consumers don't want "real relationships" on our social networking site. We want like the text message to have our social network be an efficient and fast way of sharing information, something Facebook has mastered.

Overall Google+ does not bring a bad platform as much as it brings an unnecessary platform to the table. Could there be a cult following by older people who want to strictly share content with their family members? Possibly but more likely than not I see this idea getting a long for a while on its Google name and then folding. The best application I see for Google+ would be a simple collaboration tool for small businesses through the use of group chat and video chat along with the rest of Google Apps.

To me, G+ feels a lot like the launch of Google Buzz. Technologist rushed in, Robert Scoble, Leo Laport, and Jason Calacanis immediately had thousands of followers. Each of there posts received two hundred comments but most non-techie users didn't get sucked in as much. Sure Google Buzz had a botched launched and a slew of privacy issues but those were not the only problems it had in attracting users attention.

Circles is cool but people already have difficulties with private direct messages. Also, people don't want to curate lists.

"For a social network, MySpace was incredibly introverted"

Not sure I agree with this. In my experience there was a lot more friending of strangers on MySpace. It was sleazier.

For all the "circles" flying around, when I first heard about it I figured I'd be able to do some set-theoryish organizing via venn diagrams. But I can't.

Maybe I want to send a message to my "friends" circle except not this friend in that circle, and maybe I don't want a new circle for that new group but just for that message (or maybe I do want a new circle on the fly like that called "friends minus person" or "true friends" or something). Maybe I want to send a message to everyone who is in my friends group and my schoolmates group, but not people who are just in one or the other. etc.

And the feedback button on the circles page is stuck on "analyzing the page" so I have to come and post here. Edit: Looks like that was caused by a script blocked by noscript.

While Google has made mistakes (I am still sore about them dropping Wave - I liked the Robot APIs + AppEngine) I agree with the author that supporting multiple groups (circles) is what most people want. I don't want my family to have to sift through computer science stuff, my technical friends to have to wade through my latest hiking pictures that now are just visible to my hiking circle - etc.

good read.

after all this talk about who will win, though, why don't we all just use what's best for us :) can they both exist simultaneously? i don't know, but if enough people like each of them, then why not?