4 ms·

Google+ is competing with LinkedIn and Microsoft, not Facebook

23 points by Serene 15y ago

swix 15y ago
I think this may be partly true, I mean see Google+ as being way more professional than Facebook. If Facebook is the party of Saturday night with lots of cursing and drunk people, Google+ feels more like the Sunday golf session with friends or colleagues. Just my 2 cents.
- billybob 15y ago
  Seems like the idea behind "Circles" is that it can be both. "Sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life."
  - swix 15y ago
    Yeah, I mean I certainly hope so, I am kind of tired of facebook, Google+ feels right. It's sort of like when everyone had hotmail, then everyone switched to gmail. What was gmail that hotmail wasnt or didnt have? Well no spam... clean interface, did I say no spam? ;) and some more of those goodies, one can hope this may be something similar.
    - hugh3 15y ago
      If I have just one criticism of google+ so far, it's that the look-and-feel is just a bit too white and sterile at the moment. It feels like hanging out with your friends in a hospital waiting room. Of course that's partially just that there's not much going on there yet, compared to facebook... but the other part is a page design issue. Facebook feels more intimate partly because of the use of colour, but partly because of the small fonts and lack of white space and photos everywhere. Aside from that, the "Circles" feature is precisely the right functionality. Why yes, I would love to be able to sort my "friends" into "people I've met at least twice" vs "people I actually like" vs "people I actually like who also live locally" and so forth. edit: Oh, and one other major criticism: it's picky about browser, and won't work on either of my work machines. I can understand it not liking the Firefox 2.0.0.12pre that I have on my desktop machine, but the Firefox 3.5 on this laptop can't be that out of date, can it? On the other hand, that could be a feature too. If facebook didn't work on my work machine I'd probably be more productive.
      - commandar 15y ago
        >Facebook feels more intimate partly because of the use of colour, but partly because of the small fonts and lack of white space and photos everywhere. On the other hand, I really love the page design of Plus because it's nowhere near as claustrophobic as Facebook. The larger fonts and increased whitespace make me tend to slow down and read more carefully whereas I have a tendency to simply skim over Facebook posts as quickly as possible. I definitely appreciate the large photo thumbnails, too. I don't know, it's kind of hard to put my finger on, but I'd almost say the layout feels more relaxed to me. FWIW, Andy Hertzfeld was the UI lead on the whole project.[1] >but the Firefox 3.5 on this laptop can't be that out of date, can it? FF5 was just released and FF4 won't be receiving any future updates, security or otherwise. Not supporting older versions seems in line with Google's rapid iteration approach. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hertzfeld http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hertzfeld
cheald 15y ago
No way. If they weren't competing with Facebook, they wouldn't have photo gallery functionality, Hangout, or the upcoming Games functionality. They're going straight for Facebook's throat, but they're doing it in a way that bridges the flaws in Facebook that have made room for products like LinkedIn. I have Circles set up for groups of work colleagues, professional contacts, family, and friends who I like to share fart jokes with. In each case, I can interact with those people in a manner appropriate to the nature of my relationship with them. That solves the Facebook problem for me (I didn't use it because I nearly never had anything I wanted to share with everyone I knew in the world), and also creates an environment where I can have fun with my friends and be professional with my colleagues without compromising either group. I really like it.
- sapper2 15y ago
  But that increases the risk that you share information by mistake (either yours or google+) with the wrong group. That is why people (should) have different email for private and business use. That is why I have facebook and linkedin accounts. It is very unlikely that I will upload my party pics to linkedin ;)
  - cheald 15y ago
    Certainly, that's understandable. People will still be stupid, but at that point, it's a people problem rather than a tech problem .It may just be that I grok it, but I don't forsee any problem at all separating the kinds of content I post.
  - billybob 15y ago
    It's also very unlikely that you can prevent anyone from seeing your party pics on Facebook, given FB's disregard for privacy.
- billybob 15y ago
  I agree that Circles seems like a great idea. I've always hated that in Facebook, everyone is either my friend or not. It's awkward to have to decide if someone is a friend. You either end up with lots of non-friend friends, or you have to start explicitly telling people "no, we are merely acquaintances. Let's be perfectly clear: I am not your friend." That's awkward, and in real life, you don't have to do it. So you shouldn't have to do it online. It's much better if I can group people into whatever circles make sense to me, and they can do the same to me. Nobody should get to see how I group people. It's my mental model of the world, not theirs.
gsharma 15y ago
I don't agree with it. Just by looking at their features and marketing videos/photos, at this time it is aimed towards friends and families than your co-workers or helping you find your next job. In future they may help you find a job or help you get connected with a senior exec at RIM, but not at this time.
danielrhodes 15y ago
Clearly the author has not used Google+. The service has photos, group video chat where you can watch YouTube with other friends, and status sharing, among other things. It is not a professional network or productivity tool. Although Google would probably lose if they directly competed with Facebook rather than making their own unique service, it is certainly much closer to Facebook than LinkedIn.
- jeffchuber 15y ago
  The point is that, like other Google products, it could be ported to Google Apps
- true_religion 15y ago
  I think it would be interesting if you could share your google docs through Google+. Imagine working on a book (or a school project): create a circle around that, then share your latest work with the circle. Anytime someone wants to annotate or change something, they all have access to the same file and comments/hangouts/etc. can be made around it. Sci-fi and fantasy authors do this frequently albeit through email, and online book clubs.
wmat 15y ago
As if. Google+ is competing with Facebook first, and whomever else they squish second.
jamesaguilar 15y ago
Reads like someone desperately needed some non-obvious angle to take on this story to drive readership.
bermanoid 15y ago
The point is not that Google+ is going after the LinkedIn type of market instead of Facebook; it's that it can. Nobody wants to mix business, family, and friends on Facebook because whether or not it's technically possible to segment your interactions there (and yes, I get that apparently if you dig three levels deep through just the right submenus you can figure out how to do it), it's not very intuitive, and the many default visibility changes that have happened on Facebook make any mechanism for segmentation feel very brittle. It's always been clear that Facebook wasn't interested in promoting that kind of interaction, that you should unfriend people if you didn't want them to hear what you had to say (or see what you've been up to on the weekends!). With Google+, information control one is of the most hyped core features of the service, and that's much more reassuring, it tells me that they're going to take it seriously in a way that Facebook never has.
skarayan 15y ago
I think Google+ can potentially compete with all of the current social networks. You just need a good way to segregate the streams which I think Google has managed to do.
mtkd 15y ago
If it had been at all intended for business use it would work with Google Apps accounts from launch - it doesn't.
- r00fus 15y ago
  Not like it couldn't. Just like Apple, they have a v1 product that's really good at what it does. v2 will do even more.
kin 15y ago
OP's title doesn't accurately reflect original author's title/content. Article simply says there are other non-obvious targets/purposes to Google+ besides Facebook. Facebook isn't ruled out, it would be silly to claim so.
jeffchuber 15y ago
LinkedIn's value is not in any way corporate groups. It's a glorified directory of CVs with walls. Google is not building that or competing with that.
- r00fus 15y ago
  LinkedIn is a goldmine for recruiters and hiring managers. Hell I used it back in 06 to do reference checks on independent contractors using my network for a small-group CRM project.
JonoW 15y ago
Not quite sure how he managed to link Google+ and Office365? They're completely unrelated surely?

23 points by Serene 15y ago

swix 15y ago

I think this may be partly true, I mean see Google+ as being way more professional than Facebook. If Facebook is the party of Saturday night with lots of cursing and drunk people, Google+ feels more like the Sunday golf session with friends or colleagues. Just my 2 cents.

billybob 15y ago
Seems like the idea behind "Circles" is that it can be both. "Sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles makes it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life."
- swix 15y ago
  Yeah, I mean I certainly hope so, I am kind of tired of facebook, Google+ feels right. It's sort of like when everyone had hotmail, then everyone switched to gmail. What was gmail that hotmail wasnt or didnt have? Well no spam... clean interface, did I say no spam? ;) and some more of those goodies, one can hope this may be something similar.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    If I have just one criticism of google+ so far, it's that the look-and-feel is just a bit too white and sterile at the moment. It feels like hanging out with your friends in a hospital waiting room. Of course that's partially just that there's not much going on there yet, compared to facebook... but the other part is a page design issue. Facebook feels more intimate partly because of the use of colour, but partly because of the small fonts and lack of white space and photos everywhere. Aside from that, the "Circles" feature is precisely the right functionality. Why yes, I would love to be able to sort my "friends" into "people I've met at least twice" vs "people I actually like" vs "people I actually like who also live locally" and so forth. edit: Oh, and one other major criticism: it's picky about browser, and won't work on either of my work machines. I can understand it not liking the Firefox 2.0.0.12pre that I have on my desktop machine, but the Firefox 3.5 on this laptop can't be that out of date, can it? On the other hand, that could be a feature too. If facebook didn't work on my work machine I'd probably be more productive.
    - commandar 15y ago
      >Facebook feels more intimate partly because of the use of colour, but partly because of the small fonts and lack of white space and photos everywhere. On the other hand, I really love the page design of Plus because it's nowhere near as claustrophobic as Facebook. The larger fonts and increased whitespace make me tend to slow down and read more carefully whereas I have a tendency to simply skim over Facebook posts as quickly as possible. I definitely appreciate the large photo thumbnails, too. I don't know, it's kind of hard to put my finger on, but I'd almost say the layout feels more relaxed to me. FWIW, Andy Hertzfeld was the UI lead on the whole project.[1] >but the Firefox 3.5 on this laptop can't be that out of date, can it? FF5 was just released and FF4 won't be receiving any future updates, security or otherwise. Not supporting older versions seems in line with Google's rapid iteration approach. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hertzfeld http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hertzfeld

cheald 15y ago

No way. If they weren't competing with Facebook, they wouldn't have photo gallery functionality, Hangout, or the upcoming Games functionality. They're going straight for Facebook's throat, but they're doing it in a way that bridges the flaws in Facebook that have made room for products like LinkedIn. I have Circles set up for groups of work colleagues, professional contacts, family, and friends who I like to share fart jokes with. In each case, I can interact with those people in a manner appropriate to the nature of my relationship with them. That solves the Facebook problem for me (I didn't use it because I nearly never had anything I wanted to share with everyone I knew in the world), and also creates an environment where I can have fun with my friends and be professional with my colleagues without compromising either group. I really like it.

sapper2 15y ago
But that increases the risk that you share information by mistake (either yours or google+) with the wrong group. That is why people (should) have different email for private and business use. That is why I have facebook and linkedin accounts. It is very unlikely that I will upload my party pics to linkedin ;)
- cheald 15y ago
  Certainly, that's understandable. People will still be stupid, but at that point, it's a people problem rather than a tech problem .It may just be that I grok it, but I don't forsee any problem at all separating the kinds of content I post.
- billybob 15y ago
  It's also very unlikely that you can prevent anyone from seeing your party pics on Facebook, given FB's disregard for privacy.
billybob 15y ago
I agree that Circles seems like a great idea. I've always hated that in Facebook, everyone is either my friend or not. It's awkward to have to decide if someone is a friend. You either end up with lots of non-friend friends, or you have to start explicitly telling people "no, we are merely acquaintances. Let's be perfectly clear: I am not your friend." That's awkward, and in real life, you don't have to do it. So you shouldn't have to do it online. It's much better if I can group people into whatever circles make sense to me, and they can do the same to me. Nobody should get to see how I group people. It's my mental model of the world, not theirs.

gsharma 15y ago

I don't agree with it. Just by looking at their features and marketing videos/photos, at this time it is aimed towards friends and families than your co-workers or helping you find your next job. In future they may help you find a job or help you get connected with a senior exec at RIM, but not at this time.

danielrhodes 15y ago

Clearly the author has not used Google+. The service has photos, group video chat where you can watch YouTube with other friends, and status sharing, among other things. It is not a professional network or productivity tool. Although Google would probably lose if they directly competed with Facebook rather than making their own unique service, it is certainly much closer to Facebook than LinkedIn.

jeffchuber 15y ago
The point is that, like other Google products, it could be ported to Google Apps
true_religion 15y ago
I think it would be interesting if you could share your google docs through Google+. Imagine working on a book (or a school project): create a circle around that, then share your latest work with the circle. Anytime someone wants to annotate or change something, they all have access to the same file and comments/hangouts/etc. can be made around it. Sci-fi and fantasy authors do this frequently albeit through email, and online book clubs.

wmat 15y ago

As if. Google+ is competing with Facebook first, and whomever else they squish second.

jamesaguilar 15y ago

Reads like someone desperately needed some non-obvious angle to take on this story to drive readership.

bermanoid 15y ago

The point is not that Google+ is going after the LinkedIn type of market instead of Facebook; it's that it can. Nobody wants to mix business, family, and friends on Facebook because whether or not it's technically possible to segment your interactions there (and yes, I get that apparently if you dig three levels deep through just the right submenus you can figure out how to do it), it's not very intuitive, and the many default visibility changes that have happened on Facebook make any mechanism for segmentation feel very brittle. It's always been clear that Facebook wasn't interested in promoting that kind of interaction, that you should unfriend people if you didn't want them to hear what you had to say (or see what you've been up to on the weekends!). With Google+, information control one is of the most hyped core features of the service, and that's much more reassuring, it tells me that they're going to take it seriously in a way that Facebook never has.

skarayan 15y ago

I think Google+ can potentially compete with all of the current social networks. You just need a good way to segregate the streams which I think Google has managed to do.

mtkd 15y ago

If it had been at all intended for business use it would work with Google Apps accounts from launch - it doesn't.

r00fus 15y ago
Not like it couldn't. Just like Apple, they have a v1 product that's really good at what it does. v2 will do even more.

kin 15y ago

OP's title doesn't accurately reflect original author's title/content. Article simply says there are other non-obvious targets/purposes to Google+ besides Facebook. Facebook isn't ruled out, it would be silly to claim so.

jeffchuber 15y ago

LinkedIn's value is not in any way corporate groups. It's a glorified directory of CVs with walls. Google is not building that or competing with that.

r00fus 15y ago
LinkedIn is a goldmine for recruiters and hiring managers. Hell I used it back in 06 to do reference checks on independent contractors using my network for a small-group CRM project.

JonoW 15y ago

Not quite sure how he managed to link Google+ and Office365? They're completely unrelated surely?