7 ms·

Tom Anderson: Google+ makes Google a better, more integrated set of services

152 points by genericone 15y ago

nextparadigms 15y ago
Notice how people are starting to use Google+ as blog posts? It even looks like a blog post. If only the URL's looked a little bit better, it would be perfect. And I agree with him. So far I love Google's unifying strategy, not only through deeper integration but through having similar, more streamlined design as well. And I feel this is just the beginning. I think we'll see a lot more of it this year.
- StavrosK 15y ago
  I thought of using it as a blog, but the fact that the "posts" are in the same stream as the "tweets" and generally everything else makes it less useful than a dedicated blog. It could definitely replace tumblr, though.
  - adamokane 15y ago
    Maybe it could replace Tumblr for you, but my impression of them is that they're building a platform for "creative" people... I don't think Google will touch that anytime soon.
- jamesbritt 15y ago
  Notice how people are starting to use Google+ as blog posts? It even looks like a blog post. If only the URL's looked a little bit better, it would be perfect. I just did that, then found that "public" didn't really mean public; the post was still only visible to people with Google+ accounts. Oh well. I then copied over to my actual blog. But I would like to have a true public option even if it only meant read-only of such posts.
  - nextparadigms 15y ago
    Maybe that's because the service itself is not public yet. It's still in private mode.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    I don't have a Google+ account and it's visible to me.
    - jamesbritt 15y ago
      Very interesting. Whatever link I initially grabbed to test in another browser gave me a page that said a Google+ account was needed. But just now I looked at the post and noticed a dropdown-arrow next to it which revealed an option to get a link. That link is indeed publicly visible. Also insanely long and ugly, but whatever, it works.
      - jcitme 15y ago
        That's because Google is changing an insane amount of crap during the field test. It should be public when plus finalizes...
      - Apocryphon 15y ago
        I think you just have to be logged into Gmail or another Google account to see it.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
mk 15y ago
I was thinking something similar to this last night. Google+ unifies the product set. Even the new Google mobile web is unified and easier to get around now. I can see it pulling me into products that I don't really use much just because it's more convenient.
- nkassis 15y ago
  I like the new dark bar at the top. It feels like an application now ;p I don't know why it just feels more integrated to me just for that. It's not much different then the previous bar they had but whatever I guess it makes me think of the windows start bar.
stevenj 15y ago
Thus far, I've only heard industry insiders and participants praise Google+. In technical fields, like medicine, or even computer science research, I'd pay close attention to such commenters. But a product like Google+ was made for the masses. Just like Google.com was. Just like Facebook was. So until my non-tech friends start praising Google+ as if it's a must-see movie, or a song I have to hear, or a restaurant I have to try, I'm discounting these views. I'm not saying Google+ won't be successful. I'm just saying that the people who are saying it's going to be The Next Big Thing aren't the people who make The Next Big Thing, The Next Big Thing.
- jellicle 15y ago
  Well, considering that even if you were invited within a few hours of the product launch, you've still never been able to actually log on to Google+ and use it, I'm afraid it's not really possible for the unwashed masses to chime in at this point. Unless you want them to talk about how great the screenshots look.
  - stevenj 15y ago
    Good point. But I think that only confirms my point. Google should put it in the hands of the masses, and not industry insiders (though perhaps a closed network of the masses, such as a core group of Oprah's followers). It needs to be careful not to make Google+ an engineering project for employees, and instead a great consumer product. For what it's worth, I've been using it for the last couple of days, and I don't particularly like it. I wrote a few reasons why I don't here (see the update part at the end): http://www.chipsandguac.com/thoughts/googlesocial.html http://www.chipsandguac.com/thoughts/googlesocial.html
  - btilly 15y ago
    Uh, not true. I am not inside of Google, and multiple people in my social network who are also not in Google have been using Google+ in the last few days. The product has been very usable.
    - jellicle 15y ago
seagaia 15y ago
I think Tom is pretty mature about MS being outcompeted by the other social networking sites. That's quite pleasing to see. I feel that inevitably, I will somehow end up using Google+, despite my lack of need (or want) for it at the moment, though.
bonch 15y ago
Just not interested in Google+. It was enough of a struggle to coax me onto Twitter and Facebook. I don't hear non-techies talking about Google+--it's all dedicated bloggers and people in the "Twittersphere" (ugh). Not to mention that I heard all sorts of revolutionary praise for Wave when it was released.
- nkassis 15y ago
  The thing that is hooking me in Google+ is that it's just my google account. I don't really have to think about going there unlike the other services. And what killed Facebook for me was the UI. When it became too cluttered I just got tired of it. I hate battling with a website. Google+ UI seems more polished already that what Facebook has/had(I haven't used it seriously in the last 2 years. I sporadically log in and feel like I'm going through my email thrash. )
  - nextparadigms 15y ago
    I've always thought Facebook's UI was mediocre at best, and slow. Google+ is beautiful and super fast. It's simply better in every way than Facebook.
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  Did non-techies hear about Facebook in the first 2 years of its existence? Techies know about it first because they are up to date to such things. Once people on radio and TV start talking about it, they'll know about it, too. That's how the mainstream works, otherwise it wouldn't be called mainstream anymore.
  - kmavm 15y ago
    > Did non-techies hear about Facebook in the first 2 years of its existence? Every single human attending Harvard in 2005 heard of thefacebook, and almost all of them were active users. This pattern continued as it expanded to other colleges, and eventually high schools. Facebook had a steady, population-representative mix of non-technical users from birth; it was never techies'-little-secret in the way that Twitter, Foursquare, and Quora were. Warning: I work at Facebook now, but did not back then. This is just my second-hand understanding.
krashidov 15y ago
I must say, Google's decision to make Google+ invite only was puzzling at first but its quite obvious now isn't it? It's much like how Facebook grew by restricting its service only to the top schools. This gained more hype for them as people saw that the 'elite' were using facebook and loving it. Now we have personal invites to those who have a strong voice in the tech industry generating lots of good publicity for them. I'm not saying your a Silicon Valley elite if you have google+ account. But I think that the decision to keep google+ a private was more marketing, then a technical decision.
- Lewisham 15y ago
  No, it's very clear why Google+ is invite only. Google+ is in field test. It needed to be tested publicly in order to start really getting a good understanding of what users are doing and what the scaling problems are. There are already a bunch of things that are essentially getting hotfixes in < 1 week. The only reason that Google+ was announced was that this process couldn't have been done in secret. I'm sure if there was a way to have got everyone in at the same time, they'd have done it.
  - krashidov 15y ago
    Hmm perhaps, but were google+ invites completely random? If so, then I probably am wrong and it truly was a technical field test with no marketing gimmicks. Either way, having a closed invitation has genuinely made me more interested in the product.
    - Lewisham 15y ago
      Invites were not random. Google chose those to invite.
      - Nemisis7654 15y ago
        Would you happen to know how they chose? I am just curious.
nrbafna 15y ago
Google+ does make everything fit in so well. 1) Picasa, just received a shot in the arm. Integrating it with Google+, would definitely see a surge in its adoption. Also, since people are going to use it anyways, they might seriously consider backing up all their images to Picasa. Fits right in with the Google's cloud philosophy. 2) Huddle - This is Google Talk for mobile done the right way. Given that iOS app is on the way and hopefully a Blackberry version, this can take on the new iOS messages and I dare say, the blackberry messenger. 3) Google has got the integration of notifications right, always there and yet very subtle. The top bar redesign makes sense now. With Buzz, there was a feeling of the service forced down on, in your gmail account. But, with Google+, the service notification are everywhere. web, images, books, news, g+ and yet the users do not seem to mind. Integrated the right way. 4) It has the potential to be The network. Facebook, might be a serious social network, but no is really going to use the FB email as the primary email address or as the one for formal usage. Google+ covers that. It can be your formal network; the one for friends; your primary photo service and more. 5) It would be killing, if they would Hangout a.k.a. group video chat would make its way onto the mobile apps. This might seem positively biased, well, I do love Google.
- roc 15y ago
  I've been wondering lately if Google killed Wave prematurely. If they'd polished the interface a bit more, Google+ notifications would've solved the problem of updates. They could also have dropped bot and widget support into Huddle. Imagine a robot that could parse a "what's for lunch" comment into a sort of multi-user UrbanSpoon widget with voting/vetos/suggestions/etc.
  - jcitme 15y ago
    They didn't kill wave. Don't you see? This is wave 2.0. The difference is, Google understands branding. And google wanted to cast behind the branding that wave is a "failure"
andrewljohnson 15y ago
Most businesses can't "die" suddenly. It's very hard to turn a $850,000,000 business into a $35,000,000 in just a couple of years, unless something truly catastrophic or industry-changing occurs. The exception to this rule is social internet companies. Social companies are built in a day and can die in a day - we've seen it happen again and again, and Facebook's scale is no protection. To beat Verizon, you need a network. To beat Google, you need search technology, data, and great engineers. To beat a car company, you need some factories. But to beat Zuckerburg, all you need it timing and a good strategy, and equivalent engineers. And in this case, Google seems credible on all fronts. This is the first serious threat to Facebook's existence.
- stevenj 15y ago
  I think unseating Facebook is much harder than you think. Not impossible, but very hard. I'll make a friendly $100 wager with you that Google will not have more active users on Google+ than Facebook has -- as reported by each company, a reputable publication, or measured by a public analytics firm -- 5 years from now.
  - knowtheory 15y ago
    I'd put you on the losing end of those odds. Google's key to driving adoption is going to be integration of all of their services into Google+, which means that they have very natural and robust funnels for acquiring a userbase, so long as their tools are integrated properly. Given the money that Google is pouring into this, and the incentive structure for engineers and teams at Google, i have no doubt that they will come up with clever ways to make their tools more social.
    - DrCatbox 15y ago
      'Social' is the new 'cloud' buzzword. What does it mean to have social products? To tap into a users social network? That is what Facebook offers to any company that wants, and that is why 2/3rds of websites now have a Like and Facebook Connect button on them, it is very easy for any service to attempt the social route by tapping into the thing that only Facebook so far has, the social network. Google cant engineer a social network using code, a social network requires specific steps to be carried out in perfect order, it cant be done overnight, you need to build smaller networks and connect them to larger networks as time progresses. It takes a long time, years even. Reddit is social, hackernews is social. None of them have what Facebook has, real world information about living people and their relationships. Here on HN I could have 5 or 6 accounts and no-one would notice, HN, reddit and any other "social" product does not have relationships between humans. Google mail is close to a social network, except the fact that email is mostly used for business and so is most suited for something like LinkedIn, I personally have more companies mailing me than my friends. If I tomorrow made a new google mail account and began using it instead of my old one, would google be able to tell? Facebook for sure would.
nextparadigms 15y ago
I find myself spending a lot of time in Google+ and eventually running out of content that I can see from my friends or even incoming shares. I want to discover new content and new people in Google+ the same way I discover it on Twitter. So I hope Google will make the search bar work for content shared within Google+ as well, not just for people. Doing this would get people to spend even more time on Google+, reading other people's opinions or discovering their shares, and perhaps even meeting them through it. I want to read more content from other people on Google+ and I can't right now because I don't really have a good way of finding them. I hope Google was already thinking of activating this, but they didn't because at launch there wouldn't have been much content anyway. And before anyone starts saying I should use Sparks, it doesn't work the way I'm suggesting. Sparks is more like a Google search. What I'm asking for is searching within Google+ for shares and people, just like on Twitter.
Eliezer 15y ago
You will hear nothing about Google+ a year from now. You heard it here... well, probably not first, but you heard it here.
- Baughn 15y ago
  That seems like an unwarranted level of confidence. Could you explain your reasoning?
  - khafra 15y ago
    He's using Reference Class Forecasting[1]. Without digging deep into Google+'s unique features, he's betting that it will do roughly what other web services in the class "Facebook competitor" and "Google-owned foray into social networking" have done in the past. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting
    - Eliezer 15y ago
      Eyup.
- william42 15y ago
  What probability would you put on this?
- wedrifid 15y ago
  In meatspace conversation I had Eliezer make the prediction concrete in scope and give it a number. From one year after the date of the parent comment Eliezer expects that Google+ will not appear on Hacker News (except as a mistake, an obituary, an "It failed, I told you so!", etc). The probability Eliezer assigned to his prediction being correct: 55%. I asked for the number with the intent of betting against him. At that figure I am not quite comfortable staking money. That is, I am not sufficiently confident that google+ has a significantly more than 45% chance of taking off. (Because I think that 45% chance of still being significant in a year is a good place to be, given the potential payoffs!)

152 points by genericone 15y ago

Notice how people are starting to use Google+ as blog posts? It even looks like a blog post. If only the URL's looked a little bit better, it would be perfect. And I agree with him. So far I love Google's unifying strategy, not only through deeper integration but through having similar, more streamlined design as well. And I feel this is just the beginning. I think we'll see a lot more of it this year.

StavrosK 15y ago
I thought of using it as a blog, but the fact that the "posts" are in the same stream as the "tweets" and generally everything else makes it less useful than a dedicated blog. It could definitely replace tumblr, though.
- adamokane 15y ago
  Maybe it could replace Tumblr for you, but my impression of them is that they're building a platform for "creative" people... I don't think Google will touch that anytime soon.
jamesbritt 15y ago
Notice how people are starting to use Google+ as blog posts? It even looks like a blog post. If only the URL's looked a little bit better, it would be perfect. I just did that, then found that "public" didn't really mean public; the post was still only visible to people with Google+ accounts. Oh well. I then copied over to my actual blog. But I would like to have a true public option even if it only meant read-only of such posts.
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  Maybe that's because the service itself is not public yet. It's still in private mode.
- icebraining 15y ago
  I don't have a Google+ account and it's visible to me.
  - jamesbritt 15y ago
    Very interesting. Whatever link I initially grabbed to test in another browser gave me a page that said a Google+ account was needed. But just now I looked at the post and noticed a dropdown-arrow next to it which revealed an option to get a link. That link is indeed publicly visible. Also insanely long and ugly, but whatever, it works.
    - jcitme 15y ago
      That's because Google is changing an insane amount of crap during the field test. It should be public when plus finalizes...
    - Apocryphon 15y ago
      I think you just have to be logged into Gmail or another Google account to see it.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

mk 15y ago

I was thinking something similar to this last night. Google+ unifies the product set. Even the new Google mobile web is unified and easier to get around now. I can see it pulling me into products that I don't really use much just because it's more convenient.

nkassis 15y ago
I like the new dark bar at the top. It feels like an application now ;p I don't know why it just feels more integrated to me just for that. It's not much different then the previous bar they had but whatever I guess it makes me think of the windows start bar.

stevenj 15y ago

Thus far, I've only heard industry insiders and participants praise Google+. In technical fields, like medicine, or even computer science research, I'd pay close attention to such commenters. But a product like Google+ was made for the masses. Just like Google.com was. Just like Facebook was. So until my non-tech friends start praising Google+ as if it's a must-see movie, or a song I have to hear, or a restaurant I have to try, I'm discounting these views. I'm not saying Google+ won't be successful. I'm just saying that the people who are saying it's going to be The Next Big Thing aren't the people who make The Next Big Thing, The Next Big Thing.

jellicle 15y ago
Well, considering that even if you were invited within a few hours of the product launch, you've still never been able to actually log on to Google+ and use it, I'm afraid it's not really possible for the unwashed masses to chime in at this point. Unless you want them to talk about how great the screenshots look.
- stevenj 15y ago
  Good point. But I think that only confirms my point. Google should put it in the hands of the masses, and not industry insiders (though perhaps a closed network of the masses, such as a core group of Oprah's followers). It needs to be careful not to make Google+ an engineering project for employees, and instead a great consumer product. For what it's worth, I've been using it for the last couple of days, and I don't particularly like it. I wrote a few reasons why I don't here (see the update part at the end): http://www.chipsandguac.com/thoughts/googlesocial.html http://www.chipsandguac.com/thoughts/googlesocial.html
- btilly 15y ago
  Uh, not true. I am not inside of Google, and multiple people in my social network who are also not in Google have been using Google+ in the last few days. The product has been very usable.
  - jellicle 15y ago

seagaia 15y ago

I think Tom is pretty mature about MS being outcompeted by the other social networking sites. That's quite pleasing to see. I feel that inevitably, I will somehow end up using Google+, despite my lack of need (or want) for it at the moment, though.

bonch 15y ago

Just not interested in Google+. It was enough of a struggle to coax me onto Twitter and Facebook. I don't hear non-techies talking about Google+--it's all dedicated bloggers and people in the "Twittersphere" (ugh). Not to mention that I heard all sorts of revolutionary praise for Wave when it was released.

nkassis 15y ago
The thing that is hooking me in Google+ is that it's just my google account. I don't really have to think about going there unlike the other services. And what killed Facebook for me was the UI. When it became too cluttered I just got tired of it. I hate battling with a website. Google+ UI seems more polished already that what Facebook has/had(I haven't used it seriously in the last 2 years. I sporadically log in and feel like I'm going through my email thrash. )
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  I've always thought Facebook's UI was mediocre at best, and slow. Google+ is beautiful and super fast. It's simply better in every way than Facebook.
nextparadigms 15y ago
Did non-techies hear about Facebook in the first 2 years of its existence? Techies know about it first because they are up to date to such things. Once people on radio and TV start talking about it, they'll know about it, too. That's how the mainstream works, otherwise it wouldn't be called mainstream anymore.
- kmavm 15y ago
  > Did non-techies hear about Facebook in the first 2 years of its existence? Every single human attending Harvard in 2005 heard of thefacebook, and almost all of them were active users. This pattern continued as it expanded to other colleges, and eventually high schools. Facebook had a steady, population-representative mix of non-technical users from birth; it was never techies'-little-secret in the way that Twitter, Foursquare, and Quora were. Warning: I work at Facebook now, but did not back then. This is just my second-hand understanding.

krashidov 15y ago

I must say, Google's decision to make Google+ invite only was puzzling at first but its quite obvious now isn't it? It's much like how Facebook grew by restricting its service only to the top schools. This gained more hype for them as people saw that the 'elite' were using facebook and loving it. Now we have personal invites to those who have a strong voice in the tech industry generating lots of good publicity for them. I'm not saying your a Silicon Valley elite if you have google+ account. But I think that the decision to keep google+ a private was more marketing, then a technical decision.

Lewisham 15y ago
No, it's very clear why Google+ is invite only. Google+ is in field test. It needed to be tested publicly in order to start really getting a good understanding of what users are doing and what the scaling problems are. There are already a bunch of things that are essentially getting hotfixes in < 1 week. The only reason that Google+ was announced was that this process couldn't have been done in secret. I'm sure if there was a way to have got everyone in at the same time, they'd have done it.
- krashidov 15y ago
  Hmm perhaps, but were google+ invites completely random? If so, then I probably am wrong and it truly was a technical field test with no marketing gimmicks. Either way, having a closed invitation has genuinely made me more interested in the product.
  - Lewisham 15y ago
    Invites were not random. Google chose those to invite.
    - Nemisis7654 15y ago
      Would you happen to know how they chose? I am just curious.

nrbafna 15y ago

Google+ does make everything fit in so well. 1) Picasa, just received a shot in the arm. Integrating it with Google+, would definitely see a surge in its adoption. Also, since people are going to use it anyways, they might seriously consider backing up all their images to Picasa. Fits right in with the Google's cloud philosophy. 2) Huddle - This is Google Talk for mobile done the right way. Given that iOS app is on the way and hopefully a Blackberry version, this can take on the new iOS messages and I dare say, the blackberry messenger. 3) Google has got the integration of notifications right, always there and yet very subtle. The top bar redesign makes sense now. With Buzz, there was a feeling of the service forced down on, in your gmail account. But, with Google+, the service notification are everywhere. web, images, books, news, g+ and yet the users do not seem to mind. Integrated the right way. 4) It has the potential to be The network. Facebook, might be a serious social network, but no is really going to use the FB email as the primary email address or as the one for formal usage. Google+ covers that. It can be your formal network; the one for friends; your primary photo service and more. 5) It would be killing, if they would Hangout a.k.a. group video chat would make its way onto the mobile apps. This might seem positively biased, well, I do love Google.

roc 15y ago
I've been wondering lately if Google killed Wave prematurely. If they'd polished the interface a bit more, Google+ notifications would've solved the problem of updates. They could also have dropped bot and widget support into Huddle. Imagine a robot that could parse a "what's for lunch" comment into a sort of multi-user UrbanSpoon widget with voting/vetos/suggestions/etc.
- jcitme 15y ago
  They didn't kill wave. Don't you see? This is wave 2.0. The difference is, Google understands branding. And google wanted to cast behind the branding that wave is a "failure"

andrewljohnson 15y ago

Most businesses can't "die" suddenly. It's very hard to turn a $850,000,000 business into a $35,000,000 in just a couple of years, unless something truly catastrophic or industry-changing occurs. The exception to this rule is social internet companies. Social companies are built in a day and can die in a day - we've seen it happen again and again, and Facebook's scale is no protection. To beat Verizon, you need a network. To beat Google, you need search technology, data, and great engineers. To beat a car company, you need some factories. But to beat Zuckerburg, all you need it timing and a good strategy, and equivalent engineers. And in this case, Google seems credible on all fronts. This is the first serious threat to Facebook's existence.

stevenj 15y ago
I think unseating Facebook is much harder than you think. Not impossible, but very hard. I'll make a friendly $100 wager with you that Google will not have more active users on Google+ than Facebook has -- as reported by each company, a reputable publication, or measured by a public analytics firm -- 5 years from now.
- knowtheory 15y ago
  I'd put you on the losing end of those odds. Google's key to driving adoption is going to be integration of all of their services into Google+, which means that they have very natural and robust funnels for acquiring a userbase, so long as their tools are integrated properly. Given the money that Google is pouring into this, and the incentive structure for engineers and teams at Google, i have no doubt that they will come up with clever ways to make their tools more social.
  - DrCatbox 15y ago
    'Social' is the new 'cloud' buzzword. What does it mean to have social products? To tap into a users social network? That is what Facebook offers to any company that wants, and that is why 2/3rds of websites now have a Like and Facebook Connect button on them, it is very easy for any service to attempt the social route by tapping into the thing that only Facebook so far has, the social network. Google cant engineer a social network using code, a social network requires specific steps to be carried out in perfect order, it cant be done overnight, you need to build smaller networks and connect them to larger networks as time progresses. It takes a long time, years even. Reddit is social, hackernews is social. None of them have what Facebook has, real world information about living people and their relationships. Here on HN I could have 5 or 6 accounts and no-one would notice, HN, reddit and any other "social" product does not have relationships between humans. Google mail is close to a social network, except the fact that email is mostly used for business and so is most suited for something like LinkedIn, I personally have more companies mailing me than my friends. If I tomorrow made a new google mail account and began using it instead of my old one, would google be able to tell? Facebook for sure would.

nextparadigms 15y ago

I find myself spending a lot of time in Google+ and eventually running out of content that I can see from my friends or even incoming shares. I want to discover new content and new people in Google+ the same way I discover it on Twitter. So I hope Google will make the search bar work for content shared within Google+ as well, not just for people. Doing this would get people to spend even more time on Google+, reading other people's opinions or discovering their shares, and perhaps even meeting them through it. I want to read more content from other people on Google+ and I can't right now because I don't really have a good way of finding them. I hope Google was already thinking of activating this, but they didn't because at launch there wouldn't have been much content anyway. And before anyone starts saying I should use Sparks, it doesn't work the way I'm suggesting. Sparks is more like a Google search. What I'm asking for is searching within Google+ for shares and people, just like on Twitter.

Eliezer 15y ago

You will hear nothing about Google+ a year from now. You heard it here... well, probably not first, but you heard it here.

Baughn 15y ago
That seems like an unwarranted level of confidence. Could you explain your reasoning?
- khafra 15y ago
  He's using Reference Class Forecasting[1]. Without digging deep into Google+'s unique features, he's betting that it will do roughly what other web services in the class "Facebook competitor" and "Google-owned foray into social networking" have done in the past. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_class_forecasting
  - Eliezer 15y ago
    Eyup.
william42 15y ago
What probability would you put on this?
wedrifid 15y ago
In meatspace conversation I had Eliezer make the prediction concrete in scope and give it a number. From one year after the date of the parent comment Eliezer expects that Google+ will not appear on Hacker News (except as a mistake, an obituary, an "It failed, I told you so!", etc). The probability Eliezer assigned to his prediction being correct: 55%. I asked for the number with the intent of betting against him. At that figure I am not quite comfortable staking money. That is, I am not sufficiently confident that google+ has a significantly more than 45% chance of taking off. (Because I think that 45% chance of still being significant in a year is a good place to be, given the potential payoffs!)