9 ms·

Google+ Isn’t Going Away

140 points by nickbilton 15y ago

Proclaiming that Google+ won’t survive is like saying that the Apple iOS will die, but the iPhone and iPad will live on. They are one and the same, just as Google and Google+ will be.

akkartik 15y ago
Can we switch this to the original title? 'going anywhere' could refer to a dead end or perseverance.
- ot 15y ago
  They must have changed the title after publication, both the URL and some in-page links still say "anywhere".
  - akkartik 15y ago
    Ah.
mtkd 15y ago
It does seem to have slow uptake, but it has a long-game feel to it - doing it right slowly is probably the right move. They should just buy Twitter and merge it in by allowing aliases. I'm really warming to Google - very impressed with the way they've re-skinned and consolidated their product set - it feels like they've crossed a bridge that Microsoft couldn't.
- luriel 15y ago
  > I'm really warming to Google - very impressed with the way they've re-skinned and consolidated their product set - it feels like they've crossed a bridge that Microsoft couldn't. Google Apps users still feel second-class, but seems that at long lasts, after years of failed promises they are getting around to fixing this.
gordonc 15y ago
I am hanging out on a team product meeting with peeps in Paris, Philly, NYC, and SF as I type this. For me, this makes G+ 100x more valuable than FB.
- mpclark 15y ago
  Exactly! Google+ is brilliant for business use. I'm sharing stuff with colleagues far more effectively (and selectively) now.
  - fypomg 15y ago
    It's not just business use alone that matters for Google, they are a complete productivity/life suite. Facebook fails miserably at this. Enter the realm of Facebook and what do you accomplish, you add friends, like something, and look at photos, essentially nothing, a closed experience that ignores much of the internet as a whole delivered through an unusable interface (does anyone else feels like facebook has a b-rated windows 95 feel to it?). Seriously, try to find apps in Facebook vs. finding apps in Chrome Web Store. I understand the numbers behind it, but AOL was cool at one time too. Google you have everything you need to help you be productive and useful. Amazing integration across all platforms, mobile phones, google docs, chat, news, reader(quit whining about the redesign) and discovery (google +, seriously video chat in hangouts thats pretty and easy to use, why do I need Citrix?). If your against the thought that google + can be successful and aide you in having a better social user experience online, then I'll let you get back your USWeekly and you can keep joining your "Kim Kardashian Support" groups on Facebook. Google is the company that Microsoft failed(fails?) to be. Sure they don't make pretty iphones, but they make real, usable products.
    - spullara 15y ago
      This is a pretty good assessment. I could see G+ gaining traction as a work network a la yammer but that probably isn't a big enough prize for Google to bet the company on.
sdafsdasda 15y ago
It may not have gone away, but I stopped using it. Facebook from here on out, imo.
badclient 15y ago
Google+ as a competitor to facebook is dead. Now, you can come up with all the creative ideas in the world about how G+ is not supposed to be a facebook killer. I believe that is a cop out. Google really wants to kill facebook and hoped to make a dent with G+. Why is it hard to acknowledge that they haven't made any noticeable dent? And that for the most part, facebook was very quick to address the granular privacy features that made G+ somewhat interesting. You can already see how Google+ is being integrated into the company’s entire product line. The +1 button is visible on every YouTube video and search results page, and it is even on single images from the site’s visual search. Earlier this week, Google began offering Google+ pages for businesses, too. Very classic error: assuming development/integration equal traction. Yes, google can slap +1 button on every darn page. And of course a bunch of people might click on it. The billion dollar question is what longterm benefit does G+ deliver to its users? Is there any? Engagement metrics usually answer this question. But Google won't release engagement metrics. Guess away as to why...
- bitskits 15y ago
  I respectfully disagree. Was your expectation that G+'s user-base would eclipse FB after 5 months? I don't think that's realistic (really going out on a limb here). By that metric you could have said the same thing about FB in the early days when MySpace had all the users. Clearly, over time, people moved to the better product. If you want to comment on the rate of adoption, that's one thing, but lets compare apples to apples.
  - badclient 15y ago
    I don't care about the user-base numbers. All I care about is engagement. Facebook had crazy engagement even when they had 1000 members. When they had 10M, over 50% of the users were logging in daily. Google now has 40M users and yet they refuse to release engagement numbers.
    - robryan 15y ago
      Facebook had great engagement early on because all the early users were in the same social circles. Wouldn't surprise me at all that 1000 users at the same college as me would result in more usage as opposed to 40 million users scattered across the world.
joebadmo 15y ago
I really like G+, but I'm a bit dismayed that they seem to be addressing the concerns of brands over those of users. The nymwars was a prominent example, of course, and even the resulting promise of pseudonymity features have yet to surface, while Pages for brands are now live. The lack of an outward facing platform of APIs is also concerning. I continue to hope that the Plus project is the beginning of a way to implement social features into the web itself. I hope that Google doesn't forget that as the web gets better, Google gets better, and as people use the web more, people use Google more.
- tommi 15y ago
  Give it some time. Likely Pages is dead simple to implement compared to pseudonymity. Possibly it was made by "secondary" team while the main tackles the pseudonymity. G+ has not been live that long. Let it grow and evolve.
  - joebadmo 15y ago
    Maybe you're right. But it's not just Pages. It's also stuff like Ripples, +1 integration with web sites, badgets, etc. These rollouts all seem to point to a prioritization of brands over users. I'm still hopeful, though.
    - kisielk 15y ago
      Not really surprising when you consider that the businesses are Google's customers.
    - bad_user 15y ago
      I'm just a regular user, not a business per se. But I like what they are doing with the +1 button, or with the customized search results. I think it's pretty cool experimenting with my own blog / trying to stand out in the search results and it's also pretty cool seeing your face in that list :) -- not that I want to earn any money from it or whatever. Google's direction is pretty clear to me. They are giving people the tools to promote themselves online. This is not necessarily a bad thing, although the nymwars left a bad taste in my mouth that I hope they'll rectify.
yanw 15y ago
The NYT should install some +1 buttons.
andrewfurman 15y ago
I know google won't kill it for a long time, but in most ways it is going away since no one is using it. Then hopefully one day they'll finally admit failure and it will go the way of google buzz. After listening to the zuck talk about facebook as a platform and the owner of the graph, I'm developing this scary feeling that it is going to be imposible for anyone else to break into that space.
chintan 15y ago
"Google+ is Google" So it might not be far fetched to think that they might start requiring (or implicitly nudging) you to sign-in to G+ to use their Search.
- vidarh 15y ago
  By logging in, your search results leverage your profile information and connections. I guess a pretty strong "nudge" would simply be to aggressive promote that when you're not logged in.
Jwsonic 15y ago
I think the integration of G+ in the core of Android will do wonders for its adoption. Suddenly the millions of users with Android devices have an incentive to begin using G+.
mikeryan 15y ago
I've found its starting to get hard to analyze some Google products and their likelihood of survival when it comes to Google. In my case its when I get questions about the GoogleTV. If it were any other company I'd say "yeah that product is dead" but its not any company. Its Google, who has 40B dollars in cash reserves. They have an unprecedented ability to continue to develop products which are "flops" if they continue to see a strategic advantage to being involved in the space. With the amount of financial runway, and human intelligence Google can provide to a product - its hard to see any of them continuing to fail indefinitely.
- marshray 15y ago
  WP7.
tyohn 15y ago
This may seem a little out there but maybe Google should buy MySpace and incorporate it into G+?
ed209 15y ago
I didn't start using twitter until tweetdeck came along. Google need to work on the API.
xelipe 15y ago
Whether G+ is dead or not, or if it will be killed as a product in 1 year or 5 is not entirely clear. What is sure is that Google is adding social to all of their products in the form of +1 buttons. So even if G+ is shut down like Google Buzz, Google is betting on social.
Jd 15y ago
This is a bit far afield. The most likely prospect for G+ is that it becomes a social network for the more technically inclined while Facebook remains the social network for all -- a bit like the differentiation between reddit and digg. The main reason is not something great that Google is doing, however, but the immense dislike that many have for Facebook. Facebook, of course, is sucking in all data it can get access to regardless of whether it has any legitimate reason to take that data and, despite willful violation of data protection laws, is likely to remain above the law like many other protected parties. I think the long term hope is that Google+ might become something like Gmail is to Outlook. G+ is the innovative, feature-driven, technologically saavy option, whereas even if more people use the "Outlook" option today, because of the technological advances attached to the "Gmail" option, people will transition to it over time. That said, I think that is the best possible option and I don't have any reason to think that G+ is really delivering in any meaningful way on these hopes. Let's see if they actually can stay one technological step ahead of Facebook. Some better APIs would be nice...
- zavulon 15y ago
  I would say that's true only in the beginning. Reddit was only the outlet for "technologically inclined" for the first year or so. Once it gains critical mass, in theory there's nothing preventing it from becoming the new Facebook, and Facebook from going the way of MySpace
  - Jd 15y ago
    I would agree if they innovate and Facebook doesn't. One thing preventing mass adoption will always be the clumsiness of Google's UI compared to Facebook.
- joebadmo 15y ago
  The problem with your assertion is that a lot of technically inclined people know a lot of other people and want to interact with them socially. It's Facebook's most powerful and most difficult to overcome feature: all your friends are already on it. To me, the only truly viable way for Google to combat that is to create a truly open, federated collection of social networks that can interoperate, by releasing the underlying code to G+ the way they did with Wave, or the way email works. It would enable Diaspora, identica, etc. to become full-fledged social networks, and all still be viable because they could talk to each other, as well as talk to G+. Don't trust Google or any other company? Host your own Plus server. Companies could host their own internal Plus platforms. I can't imagine that Google can fight the closed platform of Facebook with another closed platform, and the open web has always been its symbiotic ally.
andrewla 15y ago
The article is ridiculous on the face of it. "Proclaiming that Google+ won’t survive is like saying that the Apple mobile iOS operating system will die, but the iPhone and iPad will live on" -- a better analogy is "Proclaiming that Google+ won’t survive is like saying that MacOS will die, but the Mac will live on". Except that this _did_ happen. If Google+ fails, Google can let it die, and slowly remove all the places where it has intruded into search. Or Google+ can fail, and Google can decide to drag the whole company down with it, by trading all of their goodwill and usefulness to drive people to their social network. But claiming that they are forced to do the latter is stupid.
botker 15y ago
In terms of the average quality of their content, G+ : FB :: HN : /. That's just my experience, and YMMV, but if it's globally true then I expect G+ to win in the long run.
notatoad 15y ago
it's my understanding that google+ does not need to be a breakout social media phenomenon to be successful. google already has a ton of very successful social products, the + initiative is gradually integrating those product's social features under a common interface. picasaweb, for example, is a huge photo sharing network with tons of users. blogger is a huge social network with tons of users. youtube is a huge video sharing network with tons of users. google already has those users. that's the core of their social business. just because people aren't writing public 'wall' posts, doesn't mean g+ is dead. despite how similar it looks to facebook on the surface, the core of google's social business is very much not facebook.
jsavimbi 15y ago
> a social network for the more technically inclined I wouldn't be making many bets on that premise. It's a clearly defined reaction to Facebook designed and built by engineers lacking the empathy gene. Facebook defines relationships and has impact beyond what the user reads on the screen. G+ has none of that and is already being abandoned by early adopters.
mittermayr 15y ago
Not to hijack this thread, but no wonder Google+ isn't going away when they invite your work contacts and everyone else without warning you first. See this thread on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3219443 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3219443
timr 15y ago
"Instead, Google+ is a social layer that has always been intended to sit on top of the company’s flagship product: search." Flash back to an anonymous Stanford office, circa 1996, where two ambitious graduate students are sitting in front of a pile of lego servers: Larry: "Hey Sergey...you know what the world needs? A place where people can share cat photos with their friends." Sergey: "Oh, Larry...how many times have I dreamed of such a thing!?!? But...how will we get people to join our site if nobody is already sharing cat photos?" Larry: (thinks for a moment) "I've got it, Sergey! We'll create a search engine! Once we gain market dominance, we can use our captive audience to build our social network!" Sergey: "Brilliant! They'll never see it coming!" ...
- joebadmo 15y ago
  It seems clear to me that the author meant "always" wrt the inception of G+, not the inception of search. So your snark, while amusing, is misplaced.
  - ellyagg 15y ago
    That would seem to be true, as thinking otherwise is quite foolish of course. However, the very next paragraph is: "Sure, Google hopes to build a social network that competes with Facebook, Twitter and other social services, but that is not the main reason the company has put so many resources behind Google+. Instead, Google+ is a social layer that has always been intended to sit on top of the company’s flagship product: search." What? "Google+ is a social layer that has always been intended to sit on top of the company's flagship product: search" just exactly as long as they decided to "build a social network that competes with Facebook, Twitter and other social services". He is somehow trying to sleight-of-hand away the causal relationship here. If Google+ fails to rival Facebook and Twitter as a social network, it might still turn out ok somehow, but it will doubtlessly be considered a failure internally and externally.
bradgessler 15y ago
I'll be happy with Google+ if it better connects all of the various apps in the Google eco-system like GMail, Apps, etc. Right now its such a pain to invite people via email addresses in Google Docs and Calendar. I should just be able to type in peoples' names and it just works.
- tomcreighton 15y ago
  I'd be thrilled if that happened. They've made some decent first strides towards integration lately, but things are still very siloed.
- jamesgeck0 15y ago
  If the people you want to invite are in your Gmail address book, it already works like this.
betterlabs 15y ago
I already discover most new content via Facebook and the only missing piece is search. If Facebook builds a search engine and integrates within its core experience sooner than Google takes to get G+ to work and scale, it would be a good indication of who might eventually win. From the social perspective, Facebook already has the mental association at a massive scale that may be tough for G+ to get to, especially considering Google is perceived to be "more utility than fun" across its user base.
jsz0 15y ago
It looks to me that Google+ is more of a replacement for Blogger than a competitor to FaceBook at this point.
dylangs1030 15y ago
I don't think Google+ should be trying to compete with Facebook and Twitter in the traditional sense of the word. Just because a website fits into a niche of companies under the broad heading, "Social Network" doesn't mean that it has the same intentions as its other incumbents. Facebook more or less eradicated MySpace because it was a case of two websites being too similar in function, and Facebook was simply superior. Twitter and Facebook coexist without one or the other being eliminated because they don't directly compete - Twitter is useful for different functions that Facebook doesn't accomplish; but neither does Facebook or Twitter try to accomplish the other's specialties. While I agree that some competition is needed to expand user base and continually maintain attractive and trending features, it would be better for the social networks to specialize. A website like Facebook could never defeat Facebook - it has a de facto monopoly on vicarious, virtual socializing. That said, you don't really go on Facebook to announce something to the world unless you have a really popular "Page" (as opposed to profile). You sign up for Twitter and tell your followers what the update is. It's much more professional for a working environment. Facebook is personal. I feel Google+ fits somewhere in between these two dichotomies right now, which is why it feels somewhat awkward for a lot of users. But I think it's still a very good network that has potential to specialize into something neither Facebook or Twitter quite accomplish yet. If it can create its own niche within a niche, competition won't be as important as maintaining its own superlative market share for specialized functioning. Otherwise, it will die out, because directly competing with Facebook will not work at this point in time.
Aloisius 15y ago
If this was Microsoft, I'd fully expect them to keep hammering away for years and dump as much money as it took for them to own the market, but Google has institutional ADHD. If they don't outright kill it after three years of it not making them any serious money, I fully expect them to abandon it with only minor updates for some other shiny and new product.
xyzzyz 15y ago
I like to fuck guys.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

140 points by nickbilton 15y ago

Proclaiming that Google+ won’t survive is like saying that the Apple iOS will die, but the iPhone and iPad will live on. They are one and the same, just as Google and Google+ will be.

akkartik 15y ago

Can we switch this to the original title? 'going anywhere' could refer to a dead end or perseverance.

ot 15y ago
They must have changed the title after publication, both the URL and some in-page links still say "anywhere".
- akkartik 15y ago
  Ah.

mtkd 15y ago

It does seem to have slow uptake, but it has a long-game feel to it - doing it right slowly is probably the right move. They should just buy Twitter and merge it in by allowing aliases. I'm really warming to Google - very impressed with the way they've re-skinned and consolidated their product set - it feels like they've crossed a bridge that Microsoft couldn't.

luriel 15y ago
> I'm really warming to Google - very impressed with the way they've re-skinned and consolidated their product set - it feels like they've crossed a bridge that Microsoft couldn't. Google Apps users still feel second-class, but seems that at long lasts, after years of failed promises they are getting around to fixing this.

gordonc 15y ago

I am hanging out on a team product meeting with peeps in Paris, Philly, NYC, and SF as I type this. For me, this makes G+ 100x more valuable than FB.

mpclark 15y ago
Exactly! Google+ is brilliant for business use. I'm sharing stuff with colleagues far more effectively (and selectively) now.
- fypomg 15y ago
  It's not just business use alone that matters for Google, they are a complete productivity/life suite. Facebook fails miserably at this. Enter the realm of Facebook and what do you accomplish, you add friends, like something, and look at photos, essentially nothing, a closed experience that ignores much of the internet as a whole delivered through an unusable interface (does anyone else feels like facebook has a b-rated windows 95 feel to it?). Seriously, try to find apps in Facebook vs. finding apps in Chrome Web Store. I understand the numbers behind it, but AOL was cool at one time too. Google you have everything you need to help you be productive and useful. Amazing integration across all platforms, mobile phones, google docs, chat, news, reader(quit whining about the redesign) and discovery (google +, seriously video chat in hangouts thats pretty and easy to use, why do I need Citrix?). If your against the thought that google + can be successful and aide you in having a better social user experience online, then I'll let you get back your USWeekly and you can keep joining your "Kim Kardashian Support" groups on Facebook. Google is the company that Microsoft failed(fails?) to be. Sure they don't make pretty iphones, but they make real, usable products.
  - spullara 15y ago
    This is a pretty good assessment. I could see G+ gaining traction as a work network a la yammer but that probably isn't a big enough prize for Google to bet the company on.

sdafsdasda 15y ago

It may not have gone away, but I stopped using it. Facebook from here on out, imo.

badclient 15y ago

Google+ as a competitor to facebook is dead. Now, you can come up with all the creative ideas in the world about how G+ is not supposed to be a facebook killer. I believe that is a cop out. Google really wants to kill facebook and hoped to make a dent with G+. Why is it hard to acknowledge that they haven't made any noticeable dent? And that for the most part, facebook was very quick to address the granular privacy features that made G+ somewhat interesting. You can already see how Google+ is being integrated into the company’s entire product line. The +1 button is visible on every YouTube video and search results page, and it is even on single images from the site’s visual search. Earlier this week, Google began offering Google+ pages for businesses, too. Very classic error: assuming development/integration equal traction. Yes, google can slap +1 button on every darn page. And of course a bunch of people might click on it. The billion dollar question is what longterm benefit does G+ deliver to its users? Is there any? Engagement metrics usually answer this question. But Google won't release engagement metrics. Guess away as to why...

bitskits 15y ago
I respectfully disagree. Was your expectation that G+'s user-base would eclipse FB after 5 months? I don't think that's realistic (really going out on a limb here). By that metric you could have said the same thing about FB in the early days when MySpace had all the users. Clearly, over time, people moved to the better product. If you want to comment on the rate of adoption, that's one thing, but lets compare apples to apples.
- badclient 15y ago
  I don't care about the user-base numbers. All I care about is engagement. Facebook had crazy engagement even when they had 1000 members. When they had 10M, over 50% of the users were logging in daily. Google now has 40M users and yet they refuse to release engagement numbers.
  - robryan 15y ago
    Facebook had great engagement early on because all the early users were in the same social circles. Wouldn't surprise me at all that 1000 users at the same college as me would result in more usage as opposed to 40 million users scattered across the world.

joebadmo 15y ago

I really like G+, but I'm a bit dismayed that they seem to be addressing the concerns of brands over those of users. The nymwars was a prominent example, of course, and even the resulting promise of pseudonymity features have yet to surface, while Pages for brands are now live. The lack of an outward facing platform of APIs is also concerning. I continue to hope that the Plus project is the beginning of a way to implement social features into the web itself. I hope that Google doesn't forget that as the web gets better, Google gets better, and as people use the web more, people use Google more.

tommi 15y ago
Give it some time. Likely Pages is dead simple to implement compared to pseudonymity. Possibly it was made by "secondary" team while the main tackles the pseudonymity. G+ has not been live that long. Let it grow and evolve.
- joebadmo 15y ago
  Maybe you're right. But it's not just Pages. It's also stuff like Ripples, +1 integration with web sites, badgets, etc. These rollouts all seem to point to a prioritization of brands over users. I'm still hopeful, though.
  - kisielk 15y ago
    Not really surprising when you consider that the businesses are Google's customers.
  - bad_user 15y ago
    I'm just a regular user, not a business per se. But I like what they are doing with the +1 button, or with the customized search results. I think it's pretty cool experimenting with my own blog / trying to stand out in the search results and it's also pretty cool seeing your face in that list :) -- not that I want to earn any money from it or whatever. Google's direction is pretty clear to me. They are giving people the tools to promote themselves online. This is not necessarily a bad thing, although the nymwars left a bad taste in my mouth that I hope they'll rectify.

yanw 15y ago

The NYT should install some +1 buttons.

andrewfurman 15y ago

I know google won't kill it for a long time, but in most ways it is going away since no one is using it. Then hopefully one day they'll finally admit failure and it will go the way of google buzz. After listening to the zuck talk about facebook as a platform and the owner of the graph, I'm developing this scary feeling that it is going to be imposible for anyone else to break into that space.

chintan 15y ago

"Google+ is Google" So it might not be far fetched to think that they might start requiring (or implicitly nudging) you to sign-in to G+ to use their Search.

vidarh 15y ago
By logging in, your search results leverage your profile information and connections. I guess a pretty strong "nudge" would simply be to aggressive promote that when you're not logged in.

Jwsonic 15y ago

I think the integration of G+ in the core of Android will do wonders for its adoption. Suddenly the millions of users with Android devices have an incentive to begin using G+.

mikeryan 15y ago

I've found its starting to get hard to analyze some Google products and their likelihood of survival when it comes to Google. In my case its when I get questions about the GoogleTV. If it were any other company I'd say "yeah that product is dead" but its not any company. Its Google, who has 40B dollars in cash reserves. They have an unprecedented ability to continue to develop products which are "flops" if they continue to see a strategic advantage to being involved in the space. With the amount of financial runway, and human intelligence Google can provide to a product - its hard to see any of them continuing to fail indefinitely.

marshray 15y ago
WP7.

tyohn 15y ago

This may seem a little out there but maybe Google should buy MySpace and incorporate it into G+?

ed209 15y ago

I didn't start using twitter until tweetdeck came along. Google need to work on the API.

xelipe 15y ago

Whether G+ is dead or not, or if it will be killed as a product in 1 year or 5 is not entirely clear. What is sure is that Google is adding social to all of their products in the form of +1 buttons. So even if G+ is shut down like Google Buzz, Google is betting on social.

Jd 15y ago

This is a bit far afield. The most likely prospect for G+ is that it becomes a social network for the more technically inclined while Facebook remains the social network for all -- a bit like the differentiation between reddit and digg. The main reason is not something great that Google is doing, however, but the immense dislike that many have for Facebook. Facebook, of course, is sucking in all data it can get access to regardless of whether it has any legitimate reason to take that data and, despite willful violation of data protection laws, is likely to remain above the law like many other protected parties. I think the long term hope is that Google+ might become something like Gmail is to Outlook. G+ is the innovative, feature-driven, technologically saavy option, whereas even if more people use the "Outlook" option today, because of the technological advances attached to the "Gmail" option, people will transition to it over time. That said, I think that is the best possible option and I don't have any reason to think that G+ is really delivering in any meaningful way on these hopes. Let's see if they actually can stay one technological step ahead of Facebook. Some better APIs would be nice...

zavulon 15y ago
I would say that's true only in the beginning. Reddit was only the outlet for "technologically inclined" for the first year or so. Once it gains critical mass, in theory there's nothing preventing it from becoming the new Facebook, and Facebook from going the way of MySpace
- Jd 15y ago
  I would agree if they innovate and Facebook doesn't. One thing preventing mass adoption will always be the clumsiness of Google's UI compared to Facebook.
joebadmo 15y ago
The problem with your assertion is that a lot of technically inclined people know a lot of other people and want to interact with them socially. It's Facebook's most powerful and most difficult to overcome feature: all your friends are already on it. To me, the only truly viable way for Google to combat that is to create a truly open, federated collection of social networks that can interoperate, by releasing the underlying code to G+ the way they did with Wave, or the way email works. It would enable Diaspora, identica, etc. to become full-fledged social networks, and all still be viable because they could talk to each other, as well as talk to G+. Don't trust Google or any other company? Host your own Plus server. Companies could host their own internal Plus platforms. I can't imagine that Google can fight the closed platform of Facebook with another closed platform, and the open web has always been its symbiotic ally.

andrewla 15y ago

The article is ridiculous on the face of it. "Proclaiming that Google+ won’t survive is like saying that the Apple mobile iOS operating system will die, but the iPhone and iPad will live on" -- a better analogy is "Proclaiming that Google+ won’t survive is like saying that MacOS will die, but the Mac will live on". Except that this _did_ happen. If Google+ fails, Google can let it die, and slowly remove all the places where it has intruded into search. Or Google+ can fail, and Google can decide to drag the whole company down with it, by trading all of their goodwill and usefulness to drive people to their social network. But claiming that they are forced to do the latter is stupid.

botker 15y ago

In terms of the average quality of their content, G+ : FB :: HN : /. That's just my experience, and YMMV, but if it's globally true then I expect G+ to win in the long run.

notatoad 15y ago

it's my understanding that google+ does not need to be a breakout social media phenomenon to be successful. google already has a ton of very successful social products, the + initiative is gradually integrating those product's social features under a common interface. picasaweb, for example, is a huge photo sharing network with tons of users. blogger is a huge social network with tons of users. youtube is a huge video sharing network with tons of users. google already has those users. that's the core of their social business. just because people aren't writing public 'wall' posts, doesn't mean g+ is dead. despite how similar it looks to facebook on the surface, the core of google's social business is very much not facebook.

jsavimbi 15y ago

> a social network for the more technically inclined I wouldn't be making many bets on that premise. It's a clearly defined reaction to Facebook designed and built by engineers lacking the empathy gene. Facebook defines relationships and has impact beyond what the user reads on the screen. G+ has none of that and is already being abandoned by early adopters.

mittermayr 15y ago

Not to hijack this thread, but no wonder Google+ isn't going away when they invite your work contacts and everyone else without warning you first. See this thread on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3219443 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3219443

timr 15y ago

"Instead, Google+ is a social layer that has always been intended to sit on top of the company’s flagship product: search." Flash back to an anonymous Stanford office, circa 1996, where two ambitious graduate students are sitting in front of a pile of lego servers: Larry: "Hey Sergey...you know what the world needs? A place where people can share cat photos with their friends." Sergey: "Oh, Larry...how many times have I dreamed of such a thing!?!? But...how will we get people to join our site if nobody is already sharing cat photos?" Larry: (thinks for a moment) "I've got it, Sergey! We'll create a search engine! Once we gain market dominance, we can use our captive audience to build our social network!" Sergey: "Brilliant! They'll never see it coming!" ...

joebadmo 15y ago
It seems clear to me that the author meant "always" wrt the inception of G+, not the inception of search. So your snark, while amusing, is misplaced.
- ellyagg 15y ago
  That would seem to be true, as thinking otherwise is quite foolish of course. However, the very next paragraph is: "Sure, Google hopes to build a social network that competes with Facebook, Twitter and other social services, but that is not the main reason the company has put so many resources behind Google+. Instead, Google+ is a social layer that has always been intended to sit on top of the company’s flagship product: search." What? "Google+ is a social layer that has always been intended to sit on top of the company's flagship product: search" just exactly as long as they decided to "build a social network that competes with Facebook, Twitter and other social services". He is somehow trying to sleight-of-hand away the causal relationship here. If Google+ fails to rival Facebook and Twitter as a social network, it might still turn out ok somehow, but it will doubtlessly be considered a failure internally and externally.

bradgessler 15y ago

I'll be happy with Google+ if it better connects all of the various apps in the Google eco-system like GMail, Apps, etc. Right now its such a pain to invite people via email addresses in Google Docs and Calendar. I should just be able to type in peoples' names and it just works.

tomcreighton 15y ago
I'd be thrilled if that happened. They've made some decent first strides towards integration lately, but things are still very siloed.
jamesgeck0 15y ago
If the people you want to invite are in your Gmail address book, it already works like this.

betterlabs 15y ago

I already discover most new content via Facebook and the only missing piece is search. If Facebook builds a search engine and integrates within its core experience sooner than Google takes to get G+ to work and scale, it would be a good indication of who might eventually win. From the social perspective, Facebook already has the mental association at a massive scale that may be tough for G+ to get to, especially considering Google is perceived to be "more utility than fun" across its user base.

jsz0 15y ago

It looks to me that Google+ is more of a replacement for Blogger than a competitor to FaceBook at this point.

dylangs1030 15y ago

I don't think Google+ should be trying to compete with Facebook and Twitter in the traditional sense of the word. Just because a website fits into a niche of companies under the broad heading, "Social Network" doesn't mean that it has the same intentions as its other incumbents. Facebook more or less eradicated MySpace because it was a case of two websites being too similar in function, and Facebook was simply superior. Twitter and Facebook coexist without one or the other being eliminated because they don't directly compete - Twitter is useful for different functions that Facebook doesn't accomplish; but neither does Facebook or Twitter try to accomplish the other's specialties. While I agree that some competition is needed to expand user base and continually maintain attractive and trending features, it would be better for the social networks to specialize. A website like Facebook could never defeat Facebook - it has a de facto monopoly on vicarious, virtual socializing. That said, you don't really go on Facebook to announce something to the world unless you have a really popular "Page" (as opposed to profile). You sign up for Twitter and tell your followers what the update is. It's much more professional for a working environment. Facebook is personal. I feel Google+ fits somewhere in between these two dichotomies right now, which is why it feels somewhat awkward for a lot of users. But I think it's still a very good network that has potential to specialize into something neither Facebook or Twitter quite accomplish yet. If it can create its own niche within a niche, competition won't be as important as maintaining its own superlative market share for specialized functioning. Otherwise, it will die out, because directly competing with Facebook will not work at this point in time.

Aloisius 15y ago

If this was Microsoft, I'd fully expect them to keep hammering away for years and dump as much money as it took for them to own the market, but Google has institutional ADHD. If they don't outright kill it after three years of it not making them any serious money, I fully expect them to abandon it with only minor updates for some other shiny and new product.

xyzzyz 15y ago

I like to fuck guys.

deleted 15y ago

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