7 ms·
This must be Google's Facebook clone. It sure looks like it.
- andrewcooke 16y agopublic profiles have existed for a long time. this isn't new.
- lucasr 16y agoAlthough the feature itself is not new, the new design does seem to be highly inspired by Facebook's.
- magicalist 16y agoactually, if you go to this video from a year ago, you can see that this year's Facebook redesign was rather reminiscent of the old Google profiles: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYf5iSA6t6g&feature=player_detailpage#t=25s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYf5iSA6t6g&feature=playe...
- uxp 16y agoThey all seem to be reminiscent of MySpace, er I mean Hi5, or maybe I mean Friendster. Point being, a "profile" page has a standard design, the same way a e-commerce catalog page has a general layout that nearly every shopping cart employs.
- magicalist 16y agoyeah, I went for the snark, but I think your point is much closer to the truth.
- barista 16y agoGood artists copy great artists steal.
- zaidf 16y agoDo I see a "Buzz" tab? shakeshead
- seancron 16y agoWhy should Google not have a Buzz tab? Edit: Also, you can show or hide the tab. So if you don't use Buzz and you don't want that tab shown on your profile, just hide it. However, this way Google can let their users that still use Buzz display it on their profile.
- zaidf 16y agoBuzz symbolizes everything wrong with Google's social strategy. They need to move on. Linking to dead properties and adding a few fields isn't going to fix social.
- moultano 16y agoWhat does it mean for a product to "symbolize" something? Is it the product you are objecting to or the branding? (There are also pockets of really high quality activity on buzz. See Terence Tao's very active feed for instance: https://profiles.google.com/u/0/114134834346472219368/buzz https://profiles.google.com/u/0/114134834346472219368/buzz )
- zaidf 16y agoIt's a product with very little traction and an inferior experience to what's already in the market(twitter, fb). Unfortunately pockets of traction for a product as old as Buzz means very little. Social for big guys like fb and google is about scale, not niches.
- magicalist 16y agoit depends on what you mean by "experience." I think buzz is easily superior to twitter, but I use twitter because the community I engage with is there. does the existence of picasa's online albums somehow harm google because only some people use them?
- seancron 16y agoNo, it's the updated Google Profiles as discussed previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282094 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282094 (http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2011/03/decide-what-world-sees-when-it-searches.html http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2011/03/decide-what-worl...) And as I said in the previous discussion, the reason profile pages tend to use the same layout is because it's an established design pattern now. People already know what to expect when they see a page with that layout.
- esmevane 16y agoThank you for the links. I saw this post and thought, "Isn't this old news?" Maybe not, but I could have sworn I saw something in this vein weeks ago.
- patrickaljord 16y agoTo be fair it happened 4 days ago.
- dmix 16y agoThis is the internet, damnit.
- paolomaffei 16y agoIf the headline "Decide what the world sees when it searches for you." means that when someone search a name+surname profiles.google.com will always be top I see this as quite powerful!
- Kylekramer 16y agoThat has be Google's social trump card. If they ever pull the trigger on that, that is a real Facebook competitor (Actually, seems more like LinkedIn competitor now that I think about it). I always like the rumored branding of Google Me for this reason. Of course, they are getting some heat for the OneBox stuff they do, so there is some danger there.
- prawn 16y agoOnly if you want everyone Googling your profile straight up. In an era when people worry about colleagues, employers and stalkers discovering their public profiles and photos too easily, I'm not sure if this will be useful for everyone rather than self-promoters, SEOers, etc. I think your mention of LinkedIn is closer to the mark.
- hoag 16y agoSpeaking of which, has anybody tried google.com/health? Or how about the cool WebGL-powered site bodybrowser.googlelabs.com?
- citricsquid 16y agoI don't think google will ever win at social, every site that started small changed and adapted to what the users wanted, google can't do that, they launch a new site and bam millions of users instantly; yet all these users want different things, so instead of shaping the experience around what they need to get users (what Facebook did) they're catering to what they think will retain users. They have to find out what users want without the access to "organic" information, market research is proven time and time again to be worthless. The problem of getting users is often one that defines a site, when you don't have that problem it becomes a battle to stop users leaving to better more "mature" pastures. I think the next big social site (if there ever is one) will be a no-name small-gone-big site, but even then with how everyone (users) is about social now (they want to be instantly in on the next big thing) I doubt that can happen. I think that maybe Facebook is the end of social sites, which feels strange and ridiculous to say, but maybe. Google will never "get" social, there is nothing to get. Edit: in fact I think a great example of this is Google Wave. It was a fantastic product for a variety of tasks, project management was one, yet Google pitched it as the "next big thing" to users so they all joined with ridiculous expectations of what it was and wasn't and now look what happened... Tumblr is another great example in the other direction, what the site is now is very community orientated, yet from the interviews I've seen with the founder (David something) it didn't seem as if this was intention from the get go, yet users used the site like that and so they adapted and enabled users to use it like that. Now look, they're huge. Does anyone know of any products launched by big companies (Google, Microsoft etc.) that did go big? I can't think of any off hand, would be interesting to look at how they grew and developed.
- stanleydrew 16y agoGMail strikes me as a good example. Google maps. Can't think of any from Microsoft, but that's probably just because I haven't used a Microsoft product in 3 years. Actually Bing seems to be doing decently well.
- Elessar 16y agoI find it telling that for a big company, their major successes (as a big company) are typically software that do not need an installed base to add value. Mail and Maps are both applications that stand on their own and it is irrelevant what application your friends are using. However, the cases where installed base is relevant is a serious failure. Wave and Buzz come to mind.
- there 16y agoi thought orkut was google's facebook clone?
- moultano 16y agoOrkut launched a month before facebook, not that it matters now. http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=facebook%2Corkut&date=1%2F2004%2049m&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=facebook%2Corkut...
- lazylland 16y agoI think they should have gone for an about.me/flavors.me presentation . If anything, just to pull away from the facebook look.
- jlees 16y agoBut then all the comments on HN would be about how Google is copying the *.me sites and squishing poor innocent startups. :(
- Andrex 16y agoBesides that, the look they have now is a little more fitting with the spartan Google theme than a big flashy about.me knockoff would be. It works.
- lazylland 16y agoNo doubt, it works. Just that the resemblance with facebook is so strong, (right down to the grid placements), that it looks 'weak'.
- simonh 16y agoThe problem is Google isn't hungry. They don't make these things work because they don't have to. AdSense will always put food on the table, so they don't have the sense of urgency to fix this. It's a common problem for companies that already have a cash cow and then try to develop or acquire secondary services, e.g. Yahoo with Delicious. They don't have the sense of urgency, executive focus and the commitment to make them work.
- yzhengyu 16y agoHunger has little to do with it. Actually, to understand why Google is unable to succeed, you have to understand Facebook's incremental approach to integrating real life social groups. Facebook started out by targeting the college demographic, then established organizations (companies and other organizations) and eventually opening to the public. [ Another reason for Myspace's failures - after the initial inbound success, they didn't focus at all. On anything. ] I can't see Google treading down the same road using the same old approach, i.e. building an app, releasing it as a beta to try out with the masses, etc. They would have more success trying social out with the organizations which use their Enterprise apps. Disclaimer: I don't use Google Enterprise offerings, so I have no idea if they already have one there.
- rmrm 16y agomy company uses Google Apps. It absolutely astounds me that both Buzz and Wave weren't launched first as Enterprise Apps, only. They both would have been useful as enterprise collaboration and communication tools, and having it be entirely within an organization solves the "who can I talk to" problem -- much like Facebook did by targeting college campuses. As a average schmoe -- I have zero reason to use Buzz, for anything. Get everyone in my company on it, and I'd be using it every day. Everyone would. And it's actually a great tool for that, it would solve problems that aren't addressed well by either email or the various internal wikis. I'm actually still a little pissed Buzz hasn't shown up...more than a year after Google said "Yes, Buzz is certainly coming to Apps." It's just a little bit mind boggling to me -- it seems so obvious. From what I understand, Buzz was (is?) used inside of Google for internal communication/discussion. THAT is the use case for it. But they launched for something else, and ignored what would have been a great starting point for the product to gain some momentum and a community of users who would go out and sell it later on.
- aik 16y agoMy Buzz tab was completely public by default. That's annoying.
- robotron 16y ago"This does not change who can see the posts - private posts stay private."
- mapster 16y agoFacebook already serves as a personal wiki for name searches. Will Google rank Google profiles higher than Facebook results for a given name?
- ph0rque 16y agoNow if only I could import my downloaded facebook info into there...
- aj700 16y agoI posted this because I was shocked by how facebook-like it is. The buzz tab is there if buzz is enabled it seems. You prob have to turn it off entirely to kill the tab. I turned buzz off the day it launched. So I was more surprised that it now look exactly like a facebook wall. Some nice differences. You don't have to choose between male and female. But the relationship field has the same choices. Sadly, there is still no "X is currently shagging | fucking | etc Y" option. That's more like what I want to say. Pick your own damn transitive verb. It's got the lame and prudish "X is in a relationship with Y" as ever.
- serioustom 16y agoNah, that was Orkut. This is just a front-end to a CIA database.
- farlington 16y agoI logged in to check out my own, ancient Google profile (which I just about barely set up—bare minimum of info and hadn't logged in since the day I'd heard of it) to discover that has a picture in it that I'd never given Google permission to use. I'm sure they got it from Adium (I use gchat with Adium), but I found it creepy to have my profile given a picture without my knowledge or permission.
- thewordis 16y agoI'm fairly certain that Google does not pull the picture from Adium, rather, Adium pushes the picture to Google.
- rome 16y agoThe reason I don't use Google profiles is that I have no reason to. A public facing, Facebook like site? No thanks. I wasn't interested in Facebook until a real life friend from another state invited me. That's Facebook's draw for me; interaction with real friends and family.
- supervillain 16y agoGoogle's ubiquitous and omnipresent ways of doing things will win it's way on social. It's kinda crude, but I think Google's plan is to make Google Profile (aka Facebook clone) ubiquitous and omnipresent blurring the line going to a social networking site and just searching for that person. Kinda like Microsoft's thing with Windows 98 when everything can be used as Internet Explorer.
- mindcrime 16y agoI think you're onto something. Google won't "win at social" by setting up something that looks like Facebook and being a "better Facebook." And neither will anybody else, most likely. But they can "win at social" by simply continuing to link their various services together more and more and more, and gradually introducing more "social" features. When you look at what Google have with GMail, Google Calendar, Reader, Buzz, Docs, and their other properties, they have a great foundation to build useful "social" stuff. But remember, "social" doesn't necessarily mean "just like Facebook" (or Twitter, or whoever.) And I still think that a few fairly minor (IMO) tweaks to Buzz would make it an awesome product that could gain a lot more traction.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ramiyer 16y agoNow how is this different from pulse.yahoo.com? I believe Google have been great in cloning yahoo products than facebook with enhanced search functionality. Few example Mail (yahoo is still kicking google ass with their new beta mail product.Seems promising) Maps (google's maps kicks every products ass.Awesomely done product but a clone from yahoo maps.) Finance ( Yahoo way way ahead) Search - no comments :) Its google all the way News - (Yahoo all the way) Messenger All these products resemble perfect clone of what yahoo has and google has done the same thing and have failed in those products which they have invented themselves(wave- [though I loved it] etc). I am excluding their acquisitions (youtube,android etc). So finally its safe to say Google clones Yahoo products than facebook.
- yr 16y agoIs it not a terrible name "Google Profiles" for facebook killer ?
- yaix 16y agoGoogle is for search. That's what people know. As long as Google published apps under their Google brand, they will not fly. The popular servics Google has (Blogger, YouTube, etc) run all under their own brand. If Google seriously wants to make a social network, it must run under its own brand/domain. And they should give it a little more attention than they did with Orkut. I don't think the problem it Google not "getting" the "social". Its about not creating a distinguishable brand. Google is search.
- missinglink 16y agoI think "decide what the world sees when it searches for you" is a very good concept. You can expose yourself without having to worry about privacy. I wouldn't want to make my Facebook profile available to everyone.
- jgalvez 16y agoIn Brazil, it was translated as "Google Perfis". Bad bad bad. Facebook is a single brand across all countries. Google should keep a single brand as well, even "Google Profiles" would be better than "Google Profiles" translated in every language possible.