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Google+ creator: Don't call it a social network
- jpkeisala 14y agoSocial Network is Internet
- da02 14y agoI agree. I also remember when regular people just called it AOL or "that big, blue E on the desktop". All they care about is that they can talk to their friends and ask their idiot co-workers about the latest meeting.
- da02 14y agoI forgot to add some background info. I'm sorry for any confusion: As far back as the 1800s, people began to imagine a global network that would unite people, spread ideas, change the world, etc. The Internet grew out of that similar vein. So it was social right from the start. Think Engelbart's Mother of All Demos. Unfortunately, few people are using it for that. It's just an over-glorified family newsletter to most people.
- fear91 14y agoAfter unsuccessfully shaping it as a Facebook-killer? Google's PR department won't give up :)
- deelowe 14y agoActually, Vic's message has been fairly consistent on this. He's always held that the goal of G+ is to integrate social features across the entire product line, not create another social network.
- ryanhuff 14y agoWhether its a top-down or bottom-up approach, the end goal is the same, right? Corral everybody into a Google universe, where Google (and its customers) can more effectively target you with tailored information (ads, etc) by tracking your interactions with friends, web sites, etc. Isn't that also what Facebook promises to its customers?
- deelowe 14y agoJust because they both operate in the same domain doesn't mean they are the same thing. Vic has maintained that the strategy with G+ is to integrate social features into the Google product line not build another facebook, myspace, orkut, etc.. clone. And he's specifically said many times that the strategy is much larger than simply competing with facebook. The point is, G+ was never billed as a facebook killer. The OP who stated that is reiterating the media talking points (and pretending these are the words of Google execs). Vic's message has been consistent and concise. Does some G+ features overlap with FB? Sure, but the stated goal was never to build a facebook killer.
- mkr-hn 14y agoThey never positioned it as a Facebook-killer. That's an artifact of the tech press. Like deelowe said, Google has been very consistent about this.
- taligent 14y agoCool. So at some point they will be integrating Facebook then. You know because they aren't competitors or anything silly like that.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- objclxt 14y agoReally? Facebook represents a problem for Google: when your primary revenue source is display ads you want people to be looking at your adverts. Google+ is their solution to this problem - let people carry out the sort of things they use Facebook for, but on the Google.com domain (and with Google provided ads). I think it's pretty clear one of the primary drivers behind Google+ is to reduce the amount of time users spend on Facebook and transfer it back to Google. The new 'Events' features are a good example of this. The only reason Google aren't going around saying they're going to 'kill Facebook' is that it's only going to result in inevitable embarrassment. What Google PR says and how they develop their product strategies internally are very different things.
- mkr-hn 14y agoI made no comment on whether or not it was a competitor.
- jan_g 14y agoYes, I find it similar to Wolfram Alpha. The creators constantly reiterated that it's not intended as a competitor to Google, while the press hailed alpha as a Google search killer.
- DeusExMachina 14y ago"Google+ is just an upgrade to Google," says Gundotra. "People have a hard time understanding that." Well, if they do, your product sucks. The onus of understanding what your product actually is, is not on the user. You have to make a product so great and easy to understand so that there is no misunderstanding. If you don't manage to do that, you fail. Don't expect people to read your minds and know what actually the product is supposed to be instead of what they understand of it. If Google+ looks like a copy of Facebook to people, then it's just a copy of Facebook.
- wissler 14y agoYou may be too young to remember, but as computers were first becoming popular, may people had a hard time understanding them. And no, computers didn't "suck".
- gareim 14y agoYes they did. The first computers "sucked". They "sucked" in the sense that most people couldn't understand them. Computers got popular and people started understanding them as computers improved in usability. If Google+ becomes popular one day after numerous improvements, it's ridiculous to say that the first iteration of Google+ was successful just because future ones were.
- wissler 14y agoSo for you, something "sucks" if it fails to win a popularity contest. I find that definition meaningless. Computers didn't "suck", they were and are magnificent, every step of the way.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- protomyth 14y agoThe Altair 8800 for anybody but the die-hard hobbyist did "suck". It took other companies and other machines to show users why a computer was useful. Its not the user's fault for the misunderstanding.
- falling 14y agoWell Vic, it is a social network and the integration of identity in all your previous services and it is your response to the Facebook threat, so of course people compare them. Unfortunately yes, I think the message from Google has not been great it is not well understood.
- hu_me 14y agowith google+ events and instant upload before it now i m starting to understand what google meant when they said google+ is not a network its a social layer across google properties. they are just connecting all the services and features into a single coherent thing
- jdp23 14y agoStill, Gundotra won't rule out the possibility of sponsored stories down the road. We don't serve ads [on Google+], but that doesn't mean we won't have sponsored stories," he says. "There may be more relevant forms of advertising that we do believe work." Great. Something to look forward to.
- antninja 14y agoThe stream, the circles, the IM and the notifications make it a social network modeled after Facebook. Hangouts are a different service as is YouTube.
- esrauch 14y agoI don't think that is really a meaningful comparison. Consider that Gmail's inbox is a effectively a stream of posts. It has contact management, IM, and several different notifications (on the phone, count next to inbox and in title, you can enable popup notifications on your desktop). No one says that Gmail is modeled after facebook.
- saraid216 14y agoYou realize that Google Talk has been around since 2005, right?
- sbuk 14y ago"If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands."
- savramescu 14y agoI see Google+ as the foundation of Google Glass. Just think about it: Google Glass + Google Now + Google+ makes sense. People complain that there isn't much to do now, but I bet that it'll be a lot different come Glass.