Why Google+ Can Still Beat Facebook

http://www.pcworld.com/article/257261/why_google_can_still_beat_facebook.html

by bceagle • 14 years ago

24 36 14 years ago

fear91• 14 years ago

No it can't. Stop shoving it into our throats.

After Larry Page replaced Eric Schmidt, Google turned into company run by salesmen(even though Page had a really groundbreaking idea with his PageRank algorithm). It is not what it used to be in the past.

It no longer innovates. Google's strategy is now more like the one that Microsoft used - copy successful products of other companies and use your money and resources as a leverage. In the mean time, to kill the competition, perform smear campaigns against them or use the vast cash reserves to let them die the financial death(cutting their margins as in the case of Dropbox).

I mean look at Google's search results, they display google + anywhere it is possible. The same can be said about youtube, google books. Soon they will cut off tremendous amount of profit from other websites by introducing the Google shopping upgrade ( paid placement! something they despised in the past ).

They always defend themselves by saying: "Other search engines are just one click away. People are free to choose others, but since they stay, it must mean we do something good."

Well it is mainly people's habits. For majority of Internet users, 'google' means 'search'. What is interesting is that even if other search engines have better quality of results, those people will not change their search provider. People prefer Bing results to Google's results when they are served in Google's template. That proves something interesting.

I understand - shareholders want growth - but for fucks sake, stop turning that company into the Big Brother.

myko3• 14 years ago

This is ridiculous. Self driving cars not innovate? Project Glass is not innovative? Google Books, while not particularly innovate, is one of the most massive undertakings of human kind - storing digital copies of every book in existence! This is a win for humanity.

You act like Google targeted Dropbox in a recently concerted effort to take over the space. In doing so you are ignoring the fact that GDrive has been talked about since shortly after the release of Gmail. In fact according to Steven Levy's "In the Plex" it was once even ready for customer release a few years before Dropbox was in existence.

Google+ is the re-imaging of Google. It's not some Big Brother gestapo your post makes it out to be.

herval6• 14 years ago

Every time someone raises this point of view (that Google is flat-out copying everything they can), someone comes up with "remember Google Glass and the self driving cars". The problem is: neither innovations are yet on the market and we frankly don't know if they'll ever be. Just like very innovative products from OTHER companies as well. Remember MS Courier and Nokia's flexible/morphing phones?

herval6• 14 years ago

I have the feeling Apple is going the exact way with Cook. They're replacing novelty and polish with more of the same and sloppy (the new iOS shows this all around)

(please beware, I'm not comparing Apples to Googles)

ward• 14 years ago

> People prefer Bing results to Google's results when they are served in Google's template.

Source? Having compared Bing's results to Google's from time to time, Bing's seem much less relevant to the search term I'm using.

Evbn2• 14 years ago

There was a study. It ignored personalization, which is a huge factor in Google quality.

j_col• 14 years ago

Honestly, I have no emotion invested in this whatsoever. Why should I care that one corporation gains market share over another?

Keep on using one social network over another if that makes you happy, but honestly I don't see why I should care that my preferred social network "beats" the other one. Plenty of room on the Internet.

jere• 14 years ago

>To compete with Facebook, Google must integrate Google+ with its other killer services so tightly that leaving the Google property you're in and going to Facebook becomes a hassle.

Google+ can win by making it difficult to leave.

>Google makes it relatively easy to permanently delete the data you’ve banked at Google+, and walk away. You accomplish this through a Google+ tool called Google Takeout; with just a few clicks, you can download data from your Picasa Web Albums, Google profile, Google+ stream, Buzz, and contacts.

Google+ can win by making it easy to leave.

raldi• 14 years ago

You could also phrase that as, "Google can win by giving you the peace of mind that you can always take your data with you if you want to leave, but making their service so compelling that you won't want to."

technoslut• 14 years ago

The only way to beat Facebook is to disrupt this market and rethink the concept of social networking. Regardless of which service is better, G+ is not enough to make users switch. The problem with G+ is that the sole reason for its existence is to get to access the data that Facebook refuses to share. When that is your starting point, it usually forbears disaster.

The article itself is poorly thought out. I doubt that people trust Google that much more than they do Facebook and data portability is a feature that might please some users but it isn't a significant reason to join nor will most people take advantage of it.

herval6• 14 years ago

Please bear with me: what exactly is the data that Facebook refuses to share? As far as I know, apps have access to pretty much ANYTHING they wish (as long as the user grants it)...

Zimahl• 14 years ago

I think he means that Google doesn't have all the information Facebook does and can't leverage that for advertising. For example, you can find someone's Facebook profile through a Google search but if their profile is locked down Google it missing their photos, likes, friends, etc. - stuff that would allow then to tailor their ads just that much better.

Retric• 14 years ago

G+ has a higher net growth rate than Facebook sustaining that is all it takes to win.

Granted, that's hard, but social networks take a while to grow and a while to die, but Google+ supposely has 200 million users vs FB's 900 million and it's far younger. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websi...)

badclient2• 14 years ago

Facebook is successful because of its highly engaging product.

G+ is kind of like a trust fund kid: it has 200M users because its rich parents(google) decided to aggressively push it to their millions of users. Their 200M user-base says very little about G+ as a product.

lucianm• 14 years ago

Google+ is dead, just like Ping is dead. The "plus" is just a social network on top of Google products. Ping is a social network on top of iTunes and we know how well that went. People don't like "antisocial" social networks.

lrem• 14 years ago

Am I the only person seeing G+ and Facebook as too orthogonal to directly compete? Yes, the tech side is nearly identical. But the communities are so diverse, that it doesn't even make sense comparing...

I go to Facebook, what do I see? Babies of my friends, party invitations, jokes that have left Reddit 3 years ago who someone translated a year ago into a native language and so on. I go to Google+ ,what do I see? Posts, by people I've never partied with, which actually tend to interest me. There's that lawyer stuff about evolution of tech-related law. There is some really cool hacking. Some random excerpts of science. And generally a lot of interesting stuff, that's not personal and would never make it on Facebook.

herval6• 14 years ago

It all depends who you interact with and how. In my case, Facebook shows me a good deal of interesting stuff (although there's a manual work of filtering out friends over time, as they post irrelevant stuff). Stopped using G+ a few weeks ago, since all I saw there was an echo of what I'm actively blocking on Facebook: jokes, funny videos and more of the same

smackfu• 14 years ago

The problem for Google is the first group is a lot bigger than the second.

JPKab2• 14 years ago

This. I see Google + as being much, much more of a LinkedIn killer than a Facebook killer. I find that for all the purposes that LinkedIn WANTS me to go to their site and use it (Special Interest groups, etc) I end up going to Google + for. The whole "sharing with different circles" thing is very intuitive, and makes it very easy for me to selectively share things with A)coworkers, B) the public, and C)people in my field of interest that are possibly future employers, coworkers, or project partners. LinkedIn tries hard to do this and fails. They were there first, but they are now, for the vast majority of my coworkers, a place you go to update your resume or look at a shitty recruiter's broadly targeted message. I get nothing out of the groups, because they are filled with annoying recruiter spam rather than actual articles of interest.

Message to Google: Start letting users upload resumes, parse out the data (you are better at this than other companies) automatically create profiles, and let users select which aspects of their profile/resume they want to share and with who. You have 95% of the capability already present.

Get to work, because I find LinkedIn to be mediocre (despite my GREAT, GREAT respect for the data specialists at the company and their developer's work on API's)

amalag• 14 years ago

I think google + is growing slowly but surely, a lot more of my friends are on it. I like the interface a lot better. It is WAY more polished, facebook seems hacky compared to Google+

mattdeboard• 14 years ago

Definitely feels like Google is on a PR push the past week or two for Google+. Been seeing a lot of articles either differentiating G+ from FB or talking about how social media marketers can blah blah blah on G+.

In other words, this article and others like it feel like a submarine[1].

1 - http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

capo• 14 years ago

But it is NOT meant to beat Facebook!

This whole take on products in a result of the fact that tech reporters are seemingly unable to frame anything but in a "x vs. y" battle royale.

+ is meant as a pictured profile that a user would use across all their offering - which is something they lacked before - and everything else about it is just gravy.

superasn• 14 years ago

The problem with G+ is that it still doesn't offer that huge motivation to anyone to switch social networks. It's still missing the very basic ingredient of "there should a pain and the service needs to solve that pain."

Like for example before Gmail all email providers only gave 2MB of storage space and because of that you had to delete important emails daily, which was a real pain. But when Google came out with its 1GB storage plan in which there was nothing to delete ever, it solved a very big problem for a whole bunch of users. So while Gmail's interface is nice and Ajaxy and spam filters rock.. still the reason why everyone went through the trouble of changing their email addresses was still because of the huge space and no deleting emails everyday. Because if that wasn't there then I would have never used Gmail in the first place, let alone realize the other advantages it offered (like better ui, spam protection, etc)

Changing a social network similarly would also require such a huge motivation. Going after Privacy or giving Free apps is not reason enough for me or most users. They really need to solve a very real pain (unlike email this time it's not very clear what that huge pain is).

badclient2• 14 years ago

Google+ will go down as one of Google's biggest failures. It's a forced product that is killing bits of Google's soul with each passing day.

Evbn2• 14 years ago

It's not a product. It's an shared component and enhancement to all their products. Look at the name.

rch• 14 years ago

My only complaint with G+ is the same one I have for most contemporary 'social' products: inability to select a specific user name.

I would sincerely appreciate it if someone could enlighten me as to why I am almost always forced to identify myself as something other than rch. Are random or numeric account IDs really so bad? Were there problems with early products like ICQ?

Quick edit: I know they dropped the real name requirements - I'm wondering why a unique, random account id couldn't be associated with one or more aliases, gmail addresses, etc., which could be aggregated, archived, hidden, dropped, and so on.

mikeryan• 14 years ago

For ad targeting, Google can collect the data it needs from the subjects of people’s Web searches and the content of email, but that data isn’t nearly as personal and valuable as the stuff people willingly provide to Facebook every day

Isn't this statement getting fairly resoundingly proven wrong by advertisers? Facebook has some great demographic data, but Google Searches tie directly to purchasing intent. As an advertiser I'd rather know someone was searching for "mini vans" then that they're a married person with 2 kids.

Everyone keeps touting Facebook's social graph data as its killer product, yet it seems that Facebook has struggled a bit to really turn it into a revenue stream on par with Google's search data.

andrew_wc_brown• 14 years ago

Also who cares about Facebook and Google+? Isn't the web moving past social and onto something new?

I think will see the fall of the Social Empire and these social networks will break up into smaller social networks.

MetaCosm• 14 years ago

I liked this article, but I fear it is more out of hope than truth. I am not convinced that G+ will ever win.

If it does, it will be because of two things.

#1. Sideways adoptions (Google Docs, Android Phones, Etc)

#2. Walled gardens tend to stave themselves over time. Right now Facebook has mastered emulating AOL in the sense of "Facebook is the Internet" for many people. But once social becomes less hip, more a casual part of normal days the pull (or at least value) of FB will tank, since G+ attaches it to other things, it might survive better.

Why Google+ Can Still Beat Facebook

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