6 ms·

Why Google+ will become Google's only product

63 points by narad 15y ago

cek 15y ago
I put money down with a buddy (when Google+ launched) that within a year Google would drop the Google+ brand. This article basically agrees with me, but has it backwards. Google+ will just become Google. Owning an Internet scale social-graph is just too important for Google; thus they will do whatever it takes to own one. This will include forcing users who just want search (or email) to have the functionality of Google+; but to avoid brand dilution Google will drop the "+". (They will continue to use the + in the UI for +1, but that's different).
- nchuhoai 15y ago
  agreed, their latest integration with GMail definitely hints the trend
- grandpoobah 15y ago
  First thing I thought also.
- arcdrag 15y ago
  I had just assumed that Google+ would essentially encompass everything in Google that requires a google account to use. Google search, google shopping, and similar services that don't require an account would remain plus-less.
- r00fus 15y ago
  Though I agree with your reasoning, I don't think the "+" is going away, and I do think your buddy will end up winning. Like Circles, the + is becoming it's own strong brand, and though it may be that "Google+ == Google", the plus brand will stick around. Likely, Google will still retain the non-plus Google search, but put most of it's efforts into improving and integrating the "account required" Google+.
phamilton 15y ago
When I heard "center all their products around one product" I first thought of Gmail. I'm not sure if I'm alone on this, but Gmail is by far the most critical part of my Google experience.
- tikhonj 15y ago
  Could this be simply because you're taking their search for granted? Perhaps because I Chrome, I find Google search to be my main way of getting around the internet, both for specific sites and specific queries.
  - phamilton 15y ago
    I would say that's accurate. Maybe it's because I type gmail.com far more often than google.com. In fact, I don't think I ever type google.com. I probably make a couple dozen searches a day, but only spend around 30 minutes a day in the search engine. On the other hand, 99% of the time I have Gmail running.
- Jugglernaut 15y ago
  I haven't used Gmail in several years so I don't know if it offers anything not offered by other services. Smart, simple to manage email is available in abundance these days. Google search on the other hand is to me at least the epitome of function. I don't even think about how often I use it but it's many many times per day.
  - greyman 15y ago
    What would you recommend instead of Gmail? I am just looking for an alternative, but so far, only contender worth evaluating I found is Microsoft's live.com. I want IMAP, then having all my emails online (which means at least 5GB space), and what's crucial to me, grouping emails by conversations so I can read it all at once - most providers fails me here.
    - Jugglernaut 15y ago
danko 15y ago
This is a well-written and persuasive, and I think Elgan does a terrific job at structuring his argument around the 'product-to-feature' angle. What I don't agree with necessarily is the framing that Google's success is fait accompli. One skill that Google has NOT established is their ability to integrate separate services such that the whole is at least as much as the sum of its parts. One might argue the only case where they've had success in this is AdSense. Tell me if I'm forgetting something. While Google's scale and technological advance is a major plus, if you don't design these integrated products cleverly enough, you end up with a bloated, confusing, nebulous morass that people can't grasp as easily as they would independent services. I'm sure Page is aware of this, but the devil is in the execution, and again, the precedent so far is not encouraging. It'll be intriguing to see how well they do this in 2012.
ootachi 15y ago
"And between these two giants, it will be no contest. Google will almost certainly have vastly superior search -- it's Google, after all -- superior messaging, superior office documents, superior spam filtering, superior video chat -- superior everything." I think the author is drastically overstating the inevitability of Google's product superiority. Google already spectacularly failed once at messaging with Google Wave, and Gmail doesn't actually have the market share that most people think it has (even just considering webmail). Office documents don't seem to be a make-or-break feature for social, and Google Docs has had very limited success competing with Microsoft Office (in fact, my favorite Google office productivity product, EtherPad, was killed in favor of Wave). Spam filtering is legitimate, but it's not that hard of a problem really in a technical sense; Facebook could keep up. Video chat is a weak point for Facebook, granted. Besides, integrating your competitor's product as a feature of your own doesn't always spell success. Microsoft integrated Bing with its operating system through the IE search box, and look how little that has mattered. Both Apple and Microsoft have tried to "feature-ize" Dropbox, and Dropbox seems to have emerged unscathed. Instapaper is doing fine even in the face of the Safari Reading List. The list goes on. (Sometimes the strategy does work, such as IE against Netscape, but it's hardly clear-cut.)
- fpgeek 15y ago
  I think Dropbox is a great example to illustrate the weaknesses of the product-to-feature template. Yes, a product can be crushed by a feature, but only if that feature is "good enough". Dropbox, in particular, is remarkably resilient, because the competing features still aren't "good enough". Apple and Microsoft are actually relatively weak competitors because neither of them "plays well with others" (and having access to your files "anywhere" is a big part of Dropbox's value proposition). Amazon is a more significant threat (competing with your infrastructure provider is never easy), but even they haven't done enough to make Cloud Drive simple and ubiquitous. Looking at Google+ that way, I think many products won't be threatened by Google+'s features. For example, Google+ doesn't support anonymity the way Tumblr does, so it isn't likely to be a "good enough" replacement. Facebook might be special case, though. Other than the existing user base (which isn't an impossible hurdle), I don't really see any dimension along which Google+ isn't likely to be a "good enough" alternative. On the other hand, I've never been a fan of Facebook, so I'm probably a bad person to assess that.
overgard 15y ago
Apparently all this "integration" appeals to some people, but I can't say I'm one of them. The last thing I want is google+ integrated with my gmail (largely why I haven't signed up with google+). I'd rather just have my mail be my mail, not some sort of weird blob-like uber product trying desperately to force me to classify the people I kind of know into "circles". I get the value for the company, but as a consumer the idea of all this integration just creeps me out.
- notatoad 15y ago
  a circle is exactly the same feature as a contacts group, something email clients have had since their inception. you've never organized your contacts into groups or lists so you could quickly send an email to a pre-defined list of people? that's exactly what a circle is. i can't imagine any rational reason to be creeped out by that. and even if you don't group your contacts, that's perfectly fine. there is nothing forcing you to do that. after-g+ gmail works exactly the same way it did before g+, only now it has the ability to send mail to any circles you've set up in google+.
  - overgard 15y ago
    Functionally the same, but emotionally different. It's more official. Placing people into discreet groups feels weird to me. I don't really naturally do that. I don't really like the idea of placing people into certain circles while discreetly excluding others. It's not an egalitarian thing, I just don't think that social groups are that easily defined. Illegibility is really at the heart of it. The entire notion of circles strikes me as being naive and kinda creepy but mostly annoying.
  - muyuu 15y ago
    Similar, but not exactly the same. Contact groups are more of a memory aid. You just need to be able to find the person, and most of the time this is the only consideration. Circles involve privacy and thus they also involve social considerations. For instance, I'd have all my f* buddies in the same group but not in the same circle. People who I don't want to discuss my stuff together I wouldn't have in the same circle, and this happens a lot. That said, it's been a while I don't even use contact groups, I have just 2 lists: people I actively communicate with (time doesn't allow for a ton of these) and people I seldom communicate with, or whose contact I may or may not need. I've also learnt to delete people who I don't need or want in my contacts, and found it to be a great life-hack.
zanny 15y ago
They center their products around ads, because that is where the profit margin is. Google is just unique in that it does a lot of externally tangential web services that on the outside don't make direct income but really keep the google brand going and strong. They are pretty much the only company to realize they can have a separation between what makes money and what makes customers.
keypusher 15y ago
I actually hope this does come to pass, but I don't see it happening any time soon given the current state of affairs. Only a handful of my friends use G+, and they are the web/coder guys. All the social butterflies, the girls, the parties, and the pictures post on Facebook. It seems to me that many of my peers' internet surfing these days consists almost entirely of hanging out on Facebook. They have never heard of reddit, they don't follow blogs, they have no compelling interest in international news or trends, and if they have heard of G+ they consider it irrelevant. I think there is a key demographic of extroverts around which social gatherings coalesce that G+ needs to start making a dent in if they ever want to dethrone Facebook as the social space. The other thing that concerns me is Google's prior lack of commitment to these types of projects. Facebook did not succeed only because it was better than myspace, I believe it was also due to just how bad myspace became that people started actively looking for an alternative. Remember the terrible auto-start songs, horribly mangled html templates, creepy spam and rampant security flaws? It might be the case that in a few years Facebook will start to implode in much the same way. Too many crappy Zynga games, an increasinly cluttered interface, questionable privacy compromises, a constant battering of status minutia updates and/or some catastrophic privacy event might drive people to begin migration to a new service. That might take years though. My question is, will G+ still be there, ready to accept them with a stable of polished features and seamless integration to the entire Google application lineup? Or will Google have abandoned G+ years ago, the same way it did with Wave and countless other "experiments"...
wavephorm 15y ago
No, the author missed it completely. Google's business is massively threatened in many different dimensions. Google is in a desperate fight to save their business, and the Google+ product is entirely a defensive reaction to the threat imposed by social networks, targeted searches (Yelp) and non-web searching (Siri) and information discovery. I do not forsee a future where people perform searches by going to www.google.com. A conventional search engine is going to look quaint in the coming years and that's bad if you make 97% of your revenue from something that has or will peak.
- freejack 15y ago
  The author's argument seems to be hinging on his notion that Google has "superior everything", "it is Google after all". I was with him to a point - the notion of absorbing products into features of G+ is a powerful strategy that would make it difficult for the competition - but the problem with this approach for Google is that it takes their search product further and further away from what made it great in the first place. Taking this strategy to its logical conclusion almost by definition means making search more complicated than it needs to be. Google likes to say its mission is organizing the world's information, but its customers like to believe that Google's mission is simple, effective search. When it comes to defining the brand, the customer always wins. This could be Google's downfall.
- codelust 15y ago
  I don't agree with the author on many counts, but I wish that everyone who makes the point about Google being threatened by "social networks, targeted searches, non-web searching and information discovery" would elaborate a bit further. Let us look at factors you have pointed out: 1. Social networks: Google has 3 positions in Alexa's Top 10 for the US market. Only Facebook and Twitter are the only two sites that are social networks on that list. Other than Twitter (protected accounts), Bing and Paypal, every other site on that list is crawl-able by Google. Even for Facebook, it is better to have public than private pages (6,330,000,000 pages in the Google index). * It is very much possible for Facebook to be double the size that it is at and also for Google to grow at the same time. There are more people using more of the internet every year. They all need to connect with others and also find other information they are looking for. Growth for both Google and Facebook need not be mutually exclusive. The most tangible growth-related metric of year-on-year growth for Google is still pretty impressive: http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html Till a lot of the numbers start veering drastically off-course, I won't worry much about it. 2. Targeted searches: There will always be niche companies who do this over a million domains. I do not think Google would bother too much with it purely because of the clout they carry in the search market. If you have to get good non-organic traffic, you need to be indexable on Google these days. There is also the fact that Google would not want to dominate in everything related to search as it leaves them badly exposed to anti-trust issues. 3. Non-web searches: This is more of an input/interface matter. It has been possible to search through speech for a while on Android and it is something that is only bound to grow as speech recognition gets more and more better across all platforms. What matters is the quality of results and if competing platforms can provide better results from a non-Google platform, then Google would be in trouble. Parsing spoken text is different from delivering results for a query. So, Siri doing a good job of parsing what you are saying is different from Siri being able to serve results from a different search engine than Google. If the majority of people who do speech-based searches get their results from Google, it will be something for Google to rejoice and not fear. In fact, I think Apple may have even done Google a favour with Siri. There is now going to be a race to be the best voice-based interface on non-iOS platforms as a result of Siri. There is also the increased awareness of this feature now due to Siri. 4. Information discovery: If I am not mistaken, Google already is the leader on this front. They layer a lot of additional information into search results (which, I am not a fan of) and there is nobody of a comparable size who is competing with them on it. * Alexa is a flawed metric. I am using it as a comparative/indicative measure. Google's page count is broken; but they do have a LOT of pages on Facebook that is crawl-able.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
thenewgreen 15y ago
This reminds me of this article: http://hubski.com/pub?id=2069 http://hubski.com/pub?id=2069 I think it's an interesting argument. Google+ might be Google's biggest success, and also sew the seeds of their downfall. Now that G+ is spreading into Gmail, there is no going back.
varelse 15y ago
I can't see a future where the majority of people (knowingly) opt in to having their personally identifiable web histories stored and analyzed by anonymous nerds. Sure, that's happening already if one has a facebook account, and the battle's already over and lost there, but a lot of friends, more than I have on facebook, avoid social networks for that very reason. That said, it seems like google's focus is now desperate imitation of anything remotely successful on the social web with subsequent bundling of the winners into one uber-product within google+. And it would be a real shame if this is as good as it gets. Is it?

63 points by narad 15y ago

cek 15y ago

I put money down with a buddy (when Google+ launched) that within a year Google would drop the Google+ brand. This article basically agrees with me, but has it backwards. Google+ will just become Google. Owning an Internet scale social-graph is just too important for Google; thus they will do whatever it takes to own one. This will include forcing users who just want search (or email) to have the functionality of Google+; but to avoid brand dilution Google will drop the "+". (They will continue to use the + in the UI for +1, but that's different).

nchuhoai 15y ago
agreed, their latest integration with GMail definitely hints the trend
grandpoobah 15y ago
First thing I thought also.
arcdrag 15y ago
I had just assumed that Google+ would essentially encompass everything in Google that requires a google account to use. Google search, google shopping, and similar services that don't require an account would remain plus-less.
r00fus 15y ago
Though I agree with your reasoning, I don't think the "+" is going away, and I do think your buddy will end up winning. Like Circles, the + is becoming it's own strong brand, and though it may be that "Google+ == Google", the plus brand will stick around. Likely, Google will still retain the non-plus Google search, but put most of it's efforts into improving and integrating the "account required" Google+.

phamilton 15y ago

When I heard "center all their products around one product" I first thought of Gmail. I'm not sure if I'm alone on this, but Gmail is by far the most critical part of my Google experience.

tikhonj 15y ago
Could this be simply because you're taking their search for granted? Perhaps because I Chrome, I find Google search to be my main way of getting around the internet, both for specific sites and specific queries.
- phamilton 15y ago
  I would say that's accurate. Maybe it's because I type gmail.com far more often than google.com. In fact, I don't think I ever type google.com. I probably make a couple dozen searches a day, but only spend around 30 minutes a day in the search engine. On the other hand, 99% of the time I have Gmail running.
Jugglernaut 15y ago
I haven't used Gmail in several years so I don't know if it offers anything not offered by other services. Smart, simple to manage email is available in abundance these days. Google search on the other hand is to me at least the epitome of function. I don't even think about how often I use it but it's many many times per day.
- greyman 15y ago
  What would you recommend instead of Gmail? I am just looking for an alternative, but so far, only contender worth evaluating I found is Microsoft's live.com. I want IMAP, then having all my emails online (which means at least 5GB space), and what's crucial to me, grouping emails by conversations so I can read it all at once - most providers fails me here.
  - Jugglernaut 15y ago

danko 15y ago

This is a well-written and persuasive, and I think Elgan does a terrific job at structuring his argument around the 'product-to-feature' angle. What I don't agree with necessarily is the framing that Google's success is fait accompli. One skill that Google has NOT established is their ability to integrate separate services such that the whole is at least as much as the sum of its parts. One might argue the only case where they've had success in this is AdSense. Tell me if I'm forgetting something. While Google's scale and technological advance is a major plus, if you don't design these integrated products cleverly enough, you end up with a bloated, confusing, nebulous morass that people can't grasp as easily as they would independent services. I'm sure Page is aware of this, but the devil is in the execution, and again, the precedent so far is not encouraging. It'll be intriguing to see how well they do this in 2012.

ootachi 15y ago

"And between these two giants, it will be no contest. Google will almost certainly have vastly superior search -- it's Google, after all -- superior messaging, superior office documents, superior spam filtering, superior video chat -- superior everything." I think the author is drastically overstating the inevitability of Google's product superiority. Google already spectacularly failed once at messaging with Google Wave, and Gmail doesn't actually have the market share that most people think it has (even just considering webmail). Office documents don't seem to be a make-or-break feature for social, and Google Docs has had very limited success competing with Microsoft Office (in fact, my favorite Google office productivity product, EtherPad, was killed in favor of Wave). Spam filtering is legitimate, but it's not that hard of a problem really in a technical sense; Facebook could keep up. Video chat is a weak point for Facebook, granted. Besides, integrating your competitor's product as a feature of your own doesn't always spell success. Microsoft integrated Bing with its operating system through the IE search box, and look how little that has mattered. Both Apple and Microsoft have tried to "feature-ize" Dropbox, and Dropbox seems to have emerged unscathed. Instapaper is doing fine even in the face of the Safari Reading List. The list goes on. (Sometimes the strategy does work, such as IE against Netscape, but it's hardly clear-cut.)

fpgeek 15y ago
I think Dropbox is a great example to illustrate the weaknesses of the product-to-feature template. Yes, a product can be crushed by a feature, but only if that feature is "good enough". Dropbox, in particular, is remarkably resilient, because the competing features still aren't "good enough". Apple and Microsoft are actually relatively weak competitors because neither of them "plays well with others" (and having access to your files "anywhere" is a big part of Dropbox's value proposition). Amazon is a more significant threat (competing with your infrastructure provider is never easy), but even they haven't done enough to make Cloud Drive simple and ubiquitous. Looking at Google+ that way, I think many products won't be threatened by Google+'s features. For example, Google+ doesn't support anonymity the way Tumblr does, so it isn't likely to be a "good enough" replacement. Facebook might be special case, though. Other than the existing user base (which isn't an impossible hurdle), I don't really see any dimension along which Google+ isn't likely to be a "good enough" alternative. On the other hand, I've never been a fan of Facebook, so I'm probably a bad person to assess that.

overgard 15y ago

Apparently all this "integration" appeals to some people, but I can't say I'm one of them. The last thing I want is google+ integrated with my gmail (largely why I haven't signed up with google+). I'd rather just have my mail be my mail, not some sort of weird blob-like uber product trying desperately to force me to classify the people I kind of know into "circles". I get the value for the company, but as a consumer the idea of all this integration just creeps me out.

notatoad 15y ago
a circle is exactly the same feature as a contacts group, something email clients have had since their inception. you've never organized your contacts into groups or lists so you could quickly send an email to a pre-defined list of people? that's exactly what a circle is. i can't imagine any rational reason to be creeped out by that. and even if you don't group your contacts, that's perfectly fine. there is nothing forcing you to do that. after-g+ gmail works exactly the same way it did before g+, only now it has the ability to send mail to any circles you've set up in google+.
- overgard 15y ago
  Functionally the same, but emotionally different. It's more official. Placing people into discreet groups feels weird to me. I don't really naturally do that. I don't really like the idea of placing people into certain circles while discreetly excluding others. It's not an egalitarian thing, I just don't think that social groups are that easily defined. Illegibility is really at the heart of it. The entire notion of circles strikes me as being naive and kinda creepy but mostly annoying.
- muyuu 15y ago
  Similar, but not exactly the same. Contact groups are more of a memory aid. You just need to be able to find the person, and most of the time this is the only consideration. Circles involve privacy and thus they also involve social considerations. For instance, I'd have all my f* buddies in the same group but not in the same circle. People who I don't want to discuss my stuff together I wouldn't have in the same circle, and this happens a lot. That said, it's been a while I don't even use contact groups, I have just 2 lists: people I actively communicate with (time doesn't allow for a ton of these) and people I seldom communicate with, or whose contact I may or may not need. I've also learnt to delete people who I don't need or want in my contacts, and found it to be a great life-hack.

zanny 15y ago

They center their products around ads, because that is where the profit margin is. Google is just unique in that it does a lot of externally tangential web services that on the outside don't make direct income but really keep the google brand going and strong. They are pretty much the only company to realize they can have a separation between what makes money and what makes customers.

keypusher 15y ago

I actually hope this does come to pass, but I don't see it happening any time soon given the current state of affairs. Only a handful of my friends use G+, and they are the web/coder guys. All the social butterflies, the girls, the parties, and the pictures post on Facebook. It seems to me that many of my peers' internet surfing these days consists almost entirely of hanging out on Facebook. They have never heard of reddit, they don't follow blogs, they have no compelling interest in international news or trends, and if they have heard of G+ they consider it irrelevant. I think there is a key demographic of extroverts around which social gatherings coalesce that G+ needs to start making a dent in if they ever want to dethrone Facebook as the social space. The other thing that concerns me is Google's prior lack of commitment to these types of projects. Facebook did not succeed only because it was better than myspace, I believe it was also due to just how bad myspace became that people started actively looking for an alternative. Remember the terrible auto-start songs, horribly mangled html templates, creepy spam and rampant security flaws? It might be the case that in a few years Facebook will start to implode in much the same way. Too many crappy Zynga games, an increasinly cluttered interface, questionable privacy compromises, a constant battering of status minutia updates and/or some catastrophic privacy event might drive people to begin migration to a new service. That might take years though. My question is, will G+ still be there, ready to accept them with a stable of polished features and seamless integration to the entire Google application lineup? Or will Google have abandoned G+ years ago, the same way it did with Wave and countless other "experiments"...

wavephorm 15y ago

No, the author missed it completely. Google's business is massively threatened in many different dimensions. Google is in a desperate fight to save their business, and the Google+ product is entirely a defensive reaction to the threat imposed by social networks, targeted searches (Yelp) and non-web searching (Siri) and information discovery. I do not forsee a future where people perform searches by going to www.google.com. A conventional search engine is going to look quaint in the coming years and that's bad if you make 97% of your revenue from something that has or will peak.

freejack 15y ago
The author's argument seems to be hinging on his notion that Google has "superior everything", "it is Google after all". I was with him to a point - the notion of absorbing products into features of G+ is a powerful strategy that would make it difficult for the competition - but the problem with this approach for Google is that it takes their search product further and further away from what made it great in the first place. Taking this strategy to its logical conclusion almost by definition means making search more complicated than it needs to be. Google likes to say its mission is organizing the world's information, but its customers like to believe that Google's mission is simple, effective search. When it comes to defining the brand, the customer always wins. This could be Google's downfall.
codelust 15y ago
I don't agree with the author on many counts, but I wish that everyone who makes the point about Google being threatened by "social networks, targeted searches, non-web searching and information discovery" would elaborate a bit further. Let us look at factors you have pointed out: 1. Social networks: Google has 3 positions in Alexa's Top 10 for the US market. Only Facebook and Twitter are the only two sites that are social networks on that list. Other than Twitter (protected accounts), Bing and Paypal, every other site on that list is crawl-able by Google. Even for Facebook, it is better to have public than private pages (6,330,000,000 pages in the Google index). * It is very much possible for Facebook to be double the size that it is at and also for Google to grow at the same time. There are more people using more of the internet every year. They all need to connect with others and also find other information they are looking for. Growth for both Google and Facebook need not be mutually exclusive. The most tangible growth-related metric of year-on-year growth for Google is still pretty impressive: http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html Till a lot of the numbers start veering drastically off-course, I won't worry much about it. 2. Targeted searches: There will always be niche companies who do this over a million domains. I do not think Google would bother too much with it purely because of the clout they carry in the search market. If you have to get good non-organic traffic, you need to be indexable on Google these days. There is also the fact that Google would not want to dominate in everything related to search as it leaves them badly exposed to anti-trust issues. 3. Non-web searches: This is more of an input/interface matter. It has been possible to search through speech for a while on Android and it is something that is only bound to grow as speech recognition gets more and more better across all platforms. What matters is the quality of results and if competing platforms can provide better results from a non-Google platform, then Google would be in trouble. Parsing spoken text is different from delivering results for a query. So, Siri doing a good job of parsing what you are saying is different from Siri being able to serve results from a different search engine than Google. If the majority of people who do speech-based searches get their results from Google, it will be something for Google to rejoice and not fear. In fact, I think Apple may have even done Google a favour with Siri. There is now going to be a race to be the best voice-based interface on non-iOS platforms as a result of Siri. There is also the increased awareness of this feature now due to Siri. 4. Information discovery: If I am not mistaken, Google already is the leader on this front. They layer a lot of additional information into search results (which, I am not a fan of) and there is nobody of a comparable size who is competing with them on it. * Alexa is a flawed metric. I am using it as a comparative/indicative measure. Google's page count is broken; but they do have a LOT of pages on Facebook that is crawl-able.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

thenewgreen 15y ago

This reminds me of this article: http://hubski.com/pub?id=2069 http://hubski.com/pub?id=2069 I think it's an interesting argument. Google+ might be Google's biggest success, and also sew the seeds of their downfall. Now that G+ is spreading into Gmail, there is no going back.

varelse 15y ago

I can't see a future where the majority of people (knowingly) opt in to having their personally identifiable web histories stored and analyzed by anonymous nerds. Sure, that's happening already if one has a facebook account, and the battle's already over and lost there, but a lot of friends, more than I have on facebook, avoid social networks for that very reason. That said, it seems like google's focus is now desperate imitation of anything remotely successful on the social web with subsequent bundling of the winners into one uber-product within google+. And it would be a real shame if this is as good as it gets. Is it?