8 ms·

Google+'s Real Goal is Not to Kill Facebook, but to Force it to Open

124 points by tathagatadg 15y ago

tilt 15y ago
I think Google+ biggest bet right now is to spot, or introduce, the way people will live the web tomorrow. Changing it from Search to Discover. And no, it can't relay completely on our friend's interests (à la Facebook) cause they're their interests not ours. We'll probably stick much and much more to our beloved communities (topics, not friends) and start every web-related activity from there. That's something Google can't let Facebook win on.
petervandijck 15y ago
And the reason they want social Open is to commoditize it. (Same strategy as Android.) Everything a commodity except for search is the perfect world for Google.
- bobthebee 15y ago
  True. But to go a level deeper, Facebook is dangerous to Google, because: 1) The competitive advantage of AdSense ($10 billion in annualized revenue) is all about having better user profiles that can translate into better syndicated ads. Facebook will undoubtedly launch a competitor given the hires they have made. 2) The competitive advantage of AdWords ($20 billion in annualized revenue) is mostly about having better search results. Again driven by better user understanding. Facebook has excellent information on users interests. As opposed to MySpace and Twitter, most of the data on Facebook is not crawlable. It's private data, which means that Google is completely locked out. Even if it was crawlable, the data is not as valuable since Google would have to try to interpret it, while Facebook knows what it really means. Summary: Facebook is an existential threat to Google's two major lines of business AdSense and AdWords. This is going to be a huge drawn out battle. Sit back and enjoy the show.
  - bobthebee 15y ago
    And my assessment is that the article is wrong. Google+'s goal is absolutely to kill Facebook. With something this important to Google, they want to control it themselves. If not, there is always the chance that Facebook will screw them over at the next opportunity and the battle restarts.
    - bryanlarsen 15y ago
      I think you're both right. I'm sure they'd prefer to beat Facebook, but they probably consider that a stretch goal. However, forcing Facebook to open up would also be considered a victory, IMO.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    Adsense revenue is driven by purchase intent. "LA to Chicago flights" is a goldmine for advertisers. "Johnny posts a lot of movie reviews so let's target him a Netflix ad" is nice but it's no where near the same as a direct search with intent to purchase.
- bo_Olean 15y ago
  Whatever Google is doing, it is doing Open.ly, so no comments. If they integrate all Google products with Google+ tightly, it will cover entire web for most of the internet power users aka Geeks.
executive 15y ago
Everybody wanna be a Google+ expert
- jsavimbi 15y ago
  Exactly; it's been around for two weeks and people who want to believe in what they know are testing out the waters with their theories on how Plus crystalizes the social networking landscape. Truth be told, it's an immature platform with no API, nobody is really using it for more than posting their thoughts about it and the developers at Google don't even know how it will turn out. I would strongly suggest to tech journos that they hold back on making predictions until normals start using it.
  - gaius 15y ago
    Very true; if I look at my Stream right now, it's probably 95% the equivalent of people saying "tap! tap! is this thing on?" Obviously the point of a social network is the network effect, but there are some pretty basic capabilities missing from G+ that would limit its usefulness even if it had the critical mass of users already: no events and no photo tagging. And no poking ;-)
    - ahh 15y ago
      There is photo tagging: http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=1306701 http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=130670...
    - jsavimbi 15y ago
      Honestly, it looks like they made a list of current Facebook/LinkedIn functionality, dropped the childish annoyances, implemented groupings and are in the process of tying together their other services to fill the gaps that they need not build into this first version of the platform. Like ahh points out, Picasa will have tagging, I'd assume your Google calendar will provide event coordinating at some point in the future and Zynga will provide entertainment to those whose streams don't get a lot of traffic.
- 15y ago
arkitaip 15y ago
In this is truly Google's intention, then they are probably already working on an interoperability platform and even if Facebook wouldn't join them, new social networks would find it an incredibly compelling platform to join. Just think of all the marketing opportunities.
- mindcrime 15y ago
  Well, Google certainly had a big hand in OpenSocial, and I'm guessing that will be a big part of their strategy going forward, in terms of letting people plug "apps" into G+. As for sharing data, and interop, I'd be curious to know if any Googlers are part of the Federated Social Web working group: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/ http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/ I follow their mailing list, and I can't remember seeing a lot of posts from people who identified as being with Google.. but that doesn't mean they're not there. Or maybe Google just have their own plan and are going to do an end-run around the W3C initiative(s)?
  - glassx 15y ago
    I don't know about FSW, but there are some Googlers working with OStatus. And Google created PubSubHubbub, which is one of the core parts of the specification. Btw, omg, I just checked and Google+ is already sorta-compatible with OStatus in the same way Buzz was, at least for my account... Atom, ActivityStreams, WebFinger and PubSubHubbub are already there. Salmon is missing but it's a complicated protocol (took weeks for me to implement it in Ruby), so it's understandable. It means you can probably follow a Google+ user with StatusNET or Identi.ca! You can't mention or share data yet, but I hope it's coming... For me, federation IS the future. Let's hope Facebook joins the party!
diamondhead 15y ago
Is Google+ itself open?
- junkbit 15y ago
  Vic Gundotra said that the APIs are coming but they are still deciding on features while in closed beta
  - dave1010uk 15y ago
    Facebook has an API that lets you read & write to it. If having an API is what makes a social network Open then Facebook is more Open than Google+.
  - kenjackson 15y ago
    The answer to this should be easy. What are the APIs exposed to Google developers. In the MS antitrust case one of the important things that came out of it was that internal MS developers had access to the same set of APIs to Windows as 3rd party developers. That is, the CLR or Excel or Sharepoint, for example, don't have access to special APIs that no one else has access to. Google should do the same. Anything that GMail, Search, Docs, have acess to, so should Facebook, Bing, and Twitter.
    - jaredmck 15y ago
      This certainly doesn't appear to be google's current policy.
    - contextfree 15y ago
      Microsoft only follows this rule for (NT) Windows, because it was judged to have a monopoly market share. Windows Phone 7.0 and 7.5 have lots of capability accessible only to built-in apps such as Bing, for example. I guess the analogy might make sense for Google search but not the nascent Google+. (Restricting APIs isn't necessarily just about lock-in. It's a lot easier to change an API when it affects a few teams in the same company than when it affects untold numbers of external developers. Keeping it internal for a while gives them a chance to validate, and maybe iterate on, its design. Hence some internal APIs of WP7.0 were exposed in 7.5, etc.)
streptomycin 15y ago
Just like Chrome.
Hisoka 15y ago
I predict Google+ will die out in 1.5 years. It's inevitable. Too many tech people are saying it's the next big thing.. that's scary... I don't think a lotta tech geeks predicted Facebook would succeed.. Tech ppl don't know social.
- illumen 15y ago
  Overheard in the park today, "google plus is like facebook but looks better". The same thing was said by non-tech people about facebook vs myspace.
  - starwed 15y ago
    Although, a lot of why it looks better is that there aren't any ad... I'd assume that this won't last.
    - ecaradec 15y ago
      That's true, but that's a competitive advantage that google can maintain for a long long time.
  - bonch 15y ago
    What you overheard in the park today is hardly evidence of some kind of trend. Google+ isn't even open to signups yet and is on an invite-only basis, used mostly by celebrity bloggers and other tech personalities who think every new social networking site is the greatest thing ever. Even the name "Google+" and the use of "+1" is too techie and mathematical for a lot of people.
    - Hisoka 15y ago
      I think "G+" stands a chance at being a memorable name. "Are you in G+?" sounds alrite.
    - corin_ 15y ago
      The name Google+ is about as scary to non-mathmeticians as Facebook is to non-biologists.
bonch 15y ago
Google+'s goal is to index user data for advertisers, the same as the goal of every other Google product, from the search engine to Gmail.
- akkartik 15y ago
  And same as facebook. Right?
zaidf 15y ago
Google Plus's UI is still way behind Facebook. It would be a lot easier for Facebook to fix their holes with privacy(essentially copying Plus's Circles) than for Google to become more like Facebook. We needed someone to put pressure on facebook to give more granular privacy control. To the extent that Plus pushes Facebook in that direction, I'm happy! Plus' other features like Hangouts are nice but nothing really that I missed enough to drop Facebook. Privacy is one thing that I can see myself moving away from facebook for.
- sgk284 15y ago
  Any examples of how G+ is behind in UI? I find the G+ interface orders of magnitude more pleasant to use than FB. It's not perfect, but it handles all of the same use cases that I used FB for, and does so in a simpler more sensible way.
  - zaidf 15y ago
    They utilize buttons with three different colors: green, blue and red. The stream is a lot more cluttered than Facebook. As an example, this is what I see next to a name in the stream: Fname Lname - 4:17 PM - Mobile - Public Compared to Facebook: Fname Lname There are lots of such details that facebook has right--mostly because they have been around a lot longer. I am sure Google Plus will eventually get it right(facebook's very first design really sucked, too). Another example: when someone posts a picture, it seems to appear pretty big versus Facebook. It's an issue for me because most often I am not interested in pictures in my feed so a smaller version--like facebook--is preferred. If it looks like something of interest, I'll click on it. When I do click on a picture in my stream, I am taken to a page with black background with all comments appearing on right in white/gray. It shows the non-standard nature of the Google UI which I personally dislike. Facebook's UI may be boring. But most things I use a lot are boring and non-shiney. All this comes from someone who really, really hates facebook for purposely holding back privacy features. I have pretty much resorted to not posting anything that may be offensive to a 5 year old kid.
    - BrianBerk 15y ago
rmc 15y ago
How is Google+ open now? Can I be 'social across networks' with Google+ now?
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - p3rs3us 15y ago
    Don't use that extension its a malware. Please read this thread at reddit. http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ikymu http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ikymu
- InclinedPlane 15y ago
  Google accounts > data liberation You can export all of your google+ et al data and import it elsewhere (including your social graph).
  - rmc 15y ago
    What other social networking service can I import it into? (I'm pretty sure I can't import it to Facebook)
    - InclinedPlane 15y ago
      None yet, but that's hardly the point, it hasn't been possible before.
- aufreak3 15y ago
  g+ api is coming .. and you can still post youtube videos on fb.
singingfish 15y ago
My argument is that facebook, twitter, myspace, g+ etc are web applications in search of a set of protocols. So that social network thingies become interoperable like IMAP and the like are. I'm hoping that g+ is a step along this way, so I broadly want to agree with the article.
sensemaker 15y ago
What about Google+ effect on Diaspora, or is the project already dead?

124 points by tathagatadg 15y ago

tilt 15y ago

I think Google+ biggest bet right now is to spot, or introduce, the way people will live the web tomorrow. Changing it from Search to Discover. And no, it can't relay completely on our friend's interests (à la Facebook) cause they're their interests not ours. We'll probably stick much and much more to our beloved communities (topics, not friends) and start every web-related activity from there. That's something Google can't let Facebook win on.

petervandijck 15y ago

And the reason they want social Open is to commoditize it. (Same strategy as Android.) Everything a commodity except for search is the perfect world for Google.

bobthebee 15y ago
True. But to go a level deeper, Facebook is dangerous to Google, because: 1) The competitive advantage of AdSense ($10 billion in annualized revenue) is all about having better user profiles that can translate into better syndicated ads. Facebook will undoubtedly launch a competitor given the hires they have made. 2) The competitive advantage of AdWords ($20 billion in annualized revenue) is mostly about having better search results. Again driven by better user understanding. Facebook has excellent information on users interests. As opposed to MySpace and Twitter, most of the data on Facebook is not crawlable. It's private data, which means that Google is completely locked out. Even if it was crawlable, the data is not as valuable since Google would have to try to interpret it, while Facebook knows what it really means. Summary: Facebook is an existential threat to Google's two major lines of business AdSense and AdWords. This is going to be a huge drawn out battle. Sit back and enjoy the show.
- bobthebee 15y ago
  And my assessment is that the article is wrong. Google+'s goal is absolutely to kill Facebook. With something this important to Google, they want to control it themselves. If not, there is always the chance that Facebook will screw them over at the next opportunity and the battle restarts.
  - bryanlarsen 15y ago
    I think you're both right. I'm sure they'd prefer to beat Facebook, but they probably consider that a stretch goal. However, forcing Facebook to open up would also be considered a victory, IMO.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  Adsense revenue is driven by purchase intent. "LA to Chicago flights" is a goldmine for advertisers. "Johnny posts a lot of movie reviews so let's target him a Netflix ad" is nice but it's no where near the same as a direct search with intent to purchase.
bo_Olean 15y ago
Whatever Google is doing, it is doing Open.ly, so no comments. If they integrate all Google products with Google+ tightly, it will cover entire web for most of the internet power users aka Geeks.

executive 15y ago

Everybody wanna be a Google+ expert

jsavimbi 15y ago
Exactly; it's been around for two weeks and people who want to believe in what they know are testing out the waters with their theories on how Plus crystalizes the social networking landscape. Truth be told, it's an immature platform with no API, nobody is really using it for more than posting their thoughts about it and the developers at Google don't even know how it will turn out. I would strongly suggest to tech journos that they hold back on making predictions until normals start using it.
- gaius 15y ago
  Very true; if I look at my Stream right now, it's probably 95% the equivalent of people saying "tap! tap! is this thing on?" Obviously the point of a social network is the network effect, but there are some pretty basic capabilities missing from G+ that would limit its usefulness even if it had the critical mass of users already: no events and no photo tagging. And no poking ;-)
  - ahh 15y ago
    There is photo tagging: http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=1306701 http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=130670...
  - jsavimbi 15y ago
    Honestly, it looks like they made a list of current Facebook/LinkedIn functionality, dropped the childish annoyances, implemented groupings and are in the process of tying together their other services to fill the gaps that they need not build into this first version of the platform. Like ahh points out, Picasa will have tagging, I'd assume your Google calendar will provide event coordinating at some point in the future and Zynga will provide entertainment to those whose streams don't get a lot of traffic.
15y ago

arkitaip 15y ago

In this is truly Google's intention, then they are probably already working on an interoperability platform and even if Facebook wouldn't join them, new social networks would find it an incredibly compelling platform to join. Just think of all the marketing opportunities.

mindcrime 15y ago
Well, Google certainly had a big hand in OpenSocial, and I'm guessing that will be a big part of their strategy going forward, in terms of letting people plug "apps" into G+. As for sharing data, and interop, I'd be curious to know if any Googlers are part of the Federated Social Web working group: http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/ http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/ I follow their mailing list, and I can't remember seeing a lot of posts from people who identified as being with Google.. but that doesn't mean they're not there. Or maybe Google just have their own plan and are going to do an end-run around the W3C initiative(s)?
- glassx 15y ago
  I don't know about FSW, but there are some Googlers working with OStatus. And Google created PubSubHubbub, which is one of the core parts of the specification. Btw, omg, I just checked and Google+ is already sorta-compatible with OStatus in the same way Buzz was, at least for my account... Atom, ActivityStreams, WebFinger and PubSubHubbub are already there. Salmon is missing but it's a complicated protocol (took weeks for me to implement it in Ruby), so it's understandable. It means you can probably follow a Google+ user with StatusNET or Identi.ca! You can't mention or share data yet, but I hope it's coming... For me, federation IS the future. Let's hope Facebook joins the party!

diamondhead 15y ago

Is Google+ itself open?

junkbit 15y ago
Vic Gundotra said that the APIs are coming but they are still deciding on features while in closed beta
- dave1010uk 15y ago
  Facebook has an API that lets you read & write to it. If having an API is what makes a social network Open then Facebook is more Open than Google+.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  The answer to this should be easy. What are the APIs exposed to Google developers. In the MS antitrust case one of the important things that came out of it was that internal MS developers had access to the same set of APIs to Windows as 3rd party developers. That is, the CLR or Excel or Sharepoint, for example, don't have access to special APIs that no one else has access to. Google should do the same. Anything that GMail, Search, Docs, have acess to, so should Facebook, Bing, and Twitter.
  - jaredmck 15y ago
    This certainly doesn't appear to be google's current policy.
  - contextfree 15y ago
    Microsoft only follows this rule for (NT) Windows, because it was judged to have a monopoly market share. Windows Phone 7.0 and 7.5 have lots of capability accessible only to built-in apps such as Bing, for example. I guess the analogy might make sense for Google search but not the nascent Google+. (Restricting APIs isn't necessarily just about lock-in. It's a lot easier to change an API when it affects a few teams in the same company than when it affects untold numbers of external developers. Keeping it internal for a while gives them a chance to validate, and maybe iterate on, its design. Hence some internal APIs of WP7.0 were exposed in 7.5, etc.)

streptomycin 15y ago

Just like Chrome.

Hisoka 15y ago

I predict Google+ will die out in 1.5 years. It's inevitable. Too many tech people are saying it's the next big thing.. that's scary... I don't think a lotta tech geeks predicted Facebook would succeed.. Tech ppl don't know social.

illumen 15y ago
Overheard in the park today, "google plus is like facebook but looks better". The same thing was said by non-tech people about facebook vs myspace.
- starwed 15y ago
  Although, a lot of why it looks better is that there aren't any ad... I'd assume that this won't last.
  - ecaradec 15y ago
    That's true, but that's a competitive advantage that google can maintain for a long long time.
- bonch 15y ago
  What you overheard in the park today is hardly evidence of some kind of trend. Google+ isn't even open to signups yet and is on an invite-only basis, used mostly by celebrity bloggers and other tech personalities who think every new social networking site is the greatest thing ever. Even the name "Google+" and the use of "+1" is too techie and mathematical for a lot of people.
  - Hisoka 15y ago
    I think "G+" stands a chance at being a memorable name. "Are you in G+?" sounds alrite.
  - corin_ 15y ago
    The name Google+ is about as scary to non-mathmeticians as Facebook is to non-biologists.

bonch 15y ago

Google+'s goal is to index user data for advertisers, the same as the goal of every other Google product, from the search engine to Gmail.

akkartik 15y ago
And same as facebook. Right?

zaidf 15y ago

Google Plus's UI is still way behind Facebook. It would be a lot easier for Facebook to fix their holes with privacy(essentially copying Plus's Circles) than for Google to become more like Facebook. We needed someone to put pressure on facebook to give more granular privacy control. To the extent that Plus pushes Facebook in that direction, I'm happy! Plus' other features like Hangouts are nice but nothing really that I missed enough to drop Facebook. Privacy is one thing that I can see myself moving away from facebook for.

sgk284 15y ago
Any examples of how G+ is behind in UI? I find the G+ interface orders of magnitude more pleasant to use than FB. It's not perfect, but it handles all of the same use cases that I used FB for, and does so in a simpler more sensible way.
- zaidf 15y ago
  They utilize buttons with three different colors: green, blue and red. The stream is a lot more cluttered than Facebook. As an example, this is what I see next to a name in the stream: Fname Lname - 4:17 PM - Mobile - Public Compared to Facebook: Fname Lname There are lots of such details that facebook has right--mostly because they have been around a lot longer. I am sure Google Plus will eventually get it right(facebook's very first design really sucked, too). Another example: when someone posts a picture, it seems to appear pretty big versus Facebook. It's an issue for me because most often I am not interested in pictures in my feed so a smaller version--like facebook--is preferred. If it looks like something of interest, I'll click on it. When I do click on a picture in my stream, I am taken to a page with black background with all comments appearing on right in white/gray. It shows the non-standard nature of the Google UI which I personally dislike. Facebook's UI may be boring. But most things I use a lot are boring and non-shiney. All this comes from someone who really, really hates facebook for purposely holding back privacy features. I have pretty much resorted to not posting anything that may be offensive to a 5 year old kid.
  - BrianBerk 15y ago

rmc 15y ago

How is Google+ open now? Can I be 'social across networks' with Google+ now?

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- p3rs3us 15y ago
  Don't use that extension its a malware. Please read this thread at reddit. http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ikymu http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/ikymu
InclinedPlane 15y ago
Google accounts > data liberation You can export all of your google+ et al data and import it elsewhere (including your social graph).
- rmc 15y ago
  What other social networking service can I import it into? (I'm pretty sure I can't import it to Facebook)
  - InclinedPlane 15y ago
    None yet, but that's hardly the point, it hasn't been possible before.
aufreak3 15y ago
g+ api is coming .. and you can still post youtube videos on fb.

singingfish 15y ago

My argument is that facebook, twitter, myspace, g+ etc are web applications in search of a set of protocols. So that social network thingies become interoperable like IMAP and the like are. I'm hoping that g+ is a step along this way, so I broadly want to agree with the article.

sensemaker 15y ago

What about Google+ effect on Diaspora, or is the project already dead?