5 ms·
The Race For Lock-in: Google+ and Facebook
- donaq 15y agoGoogle has lock-in with search, and Facebook has lock-in with social networking Argh, how does Google have lock-in with search? The minute Google stops delivering relevant results, you can switch search engines with practically no cost.
- cj 15y ago"The minute Google stops delivering relevant results" That's the thing. Amazon has a better product search, IMDB has better movie search, and StackOverflow has better results for technical question. Google doesn't necessarily provide the best results for all queries, but people still use it because it's easy, even though it's not the best. In that way, Google has lock-in with search.
- cageface 15y agoGenerality and lock-in are two completely different things. I can do exactly what you describe just as easily with Bing.
- jmarbach 15y agoWith the addition of products such as Google+, Google is aiming to secure on their lock-in by harnessing more personal data about you. Besides Facebook, Google provides the most personally relevant results. As long as you continue to log-in to Google services, Google will have a lock-in on personally relevant search.
- cageface 15y agoI strongly doubt that search personalization is going to to be effective enough to create any real lock-in. Google+ is more about preventing Facebook from locking out screen space for Google's ads.
- rmrm 15y agoThat is not lock-in, in and of itself. It is valuable data (for both Google and yourself), but it isn't lock in. Getting your data back out in a way that is useful to someone else, making my history portable is what mitigates lock-in. Lack of portability and exchangeability of things you own, not the usefulness of a service, is the hallmark of vendor lock-in. I can actually get my web history on Google, Google provides an XML feed of searches I could take and give to someone else if I wanted to -- but it only covers a 1 month snapshot. It has the term I searched for, and the link I clicked on. That is a pretty good corpus of information about me. Google could provide all of my web history, that would be a very positive sign of non lock-in behavior. Maybe they do somewhere, but I don't see it on the DLF page. So I agree with you that they could do more. But I disagree with your apparent reasoning as to what lock-in actually means.
- vegardx 15y agoThis has nothing to do with lock-ins, in it's proper meaning. You can't just make up your own meaning on a word just to make your article ~interesting.
- macavity23 15y agoI think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Google operates. They want to prevent lock-in, lock-in by anybody, because if the information is open, they can 'organize it and make it accessible and useful' (their mission statement). Take their two most successful non-search products, Android and Chrome. Both of these are Open Source, and are explicitly positioned not directly to make money for Google, but rather to offer a highly functional, feature-rich and free product so that nobody else in the same market can try and lock consumers into their product without looking lacklustre by comparison. Thus far Chrome has been extremely successful in this regard, Android moderately so - but that's Google's modus operandi throughout their business, and there's no reason to suspect that Plus will be anything different. They just want to make sure they can search it - they don't care who controls it.