Given their social networking dominance, their swimming pools filled with vc money, and the top engineers working for them, does anyone else feel like Facebook are underachievers?
Considering they had to have known about G+ for a while before it launched, you would think they would really hit something out of the park in terms of competitive features. These are all pretty lackluster, imho.
Apple does this every release. Marketing is important.
Facebook is now the ubiquitous video chat social network, built on Skype. Google+ is Circles on your Gmail. Everything else you say requires some level of convincing.
I SERIOUSLY doubt MS was giving them architectural guidance on how to make this work. Probably would have more to do with the architectural experience of the devs.
I wasn't suggesting that MS told them to do that. To my knowledge, this first time that Facebook has left the Web and launched a feature only available to specific OSs by way of desktop applications.
Remember that this video chat is not a web page. It's a Microsoft (and Apple? I don't know) desktop application that integrates into their web page.
I'm suggesting that Facebook is showing their alliance to Microsoft by ignoring some other OSs and launching Microsoft-powered features. If you include video chat as an integral part of Facebook, then you can no longer call Facebook a web site.
:) To be fair, G+'s Hangouts is also currently a desktop app (requires the Gtalk plugin I think). I suspect Google will move away from that and go towards a full web page. We'll see. This is all so exciting.
Yep! I was Hanging Out on Ubuntu with 6 friends on about day 2 of G+. Facebook doesn't even support my OS, so there's absolutely 0 chance I'll use their video chat.
Hangouts is group video. Huddle is group text chats, which for some reason is mobile only and has no web interface. No one uses it 'cause not everyone has an Android device.
The video features built into gchat have served my needs perfectly. Between hangouts & youtube video sharing, I think google+ is out-shining them at this point in time.
To me, there's exactly one compelling thing about Facebook: It illustrated that normal humans will join and use a social network.
Beyond that, I don't see any reason why their adoption patterns will differ from those we've already seen with other humans on other "social" web properties (Hi Livejournal/Facethejury/Friendster et al!). Which is to say, the enthusiastic folks eventually get those who joined begrudgingly involved, everyone has fun for a while, then everyone gets bored and moves on.
It's not as if nerds who have SRS PRIVACY CONCERNZ and talk about things like data portability are the only people growing weary of Facebook. An approximate majority of the musicians/DJs/artists I know in real life and on the internet say they hate Facebook but maintain an account for promotional purposes. But they all seem to have really warmed up to Twitter. (Specifically, most in the music crowd seem to have adopted a combination of Twitter and Soundcloud as their primary internet residencies, filling the void where MySpace once resided.)
To assume that Facebook will remain the social network of note just because they're Facebook, or just because they got there first (sort of) seems naïve.
The network effect will be the primary driver of where we all—geeks and normies alike—end up next. Facebook doesn't really have any control over that. And we've seen that the network effect can linger even after the product has effectively failed (Hi MySpace!), so having the network now may not be a reliable indicator that they'll keep it, even in the very near term.
And that leaves the product. Which is fine, I guess. Not that bad, not that great. But when Google announces their first real crack at a genuine social network and it has features no one's even talked about yet, and it's cooked directly into their mobile platform running on about 180 Mm devices worldwide [1][2], Facebook's "awesome" reply, "We've got video chat now," falls flat. To me at least.
[1] http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1622614
[2] Android/Google+ and some of the new iOS 5 features along with Apple's Twitter partnership have me semi-convinced that we're moving towards the transparent social network, where membership has much more to do with which smartphone you buy than anything else. I predict that in a competition with Google and Apple/Twitter, Microsoft/Facebook will turn out to be also-rans. Also, poor RIM.
These never reached the audience Facebook has today. 750M users and growing, FB won social networking. Game over.
It's not as if nerds who have SRS PRIVACY CONCERNZ and talk about things like data portability are the only people growing weary of Facebook.
I guarantee you this is a very tiny portion. I live with someone who spends lots of time on FB ("Oh, look at this pictures from XYZ"). They don't even know there is a discussion going around privacy.
To assume that Facebook will remain the social network of note just because they're Facebook, or just because they got there first (sort of) seems naïve.
It will just as Microsoft has dominated the OS space. Another desktop OS is not going to kill MSFT, but maybe mobile will. Same for FB, it will take a different experience to get people to stop spending as much time on the site. Something like Instagram or With with a few added features/mechanisms.
I don't have the time this afternoon to find hard stats on this, but if you were to plot active userbase over total internet users worldwide for, lets say, AIM & Livejournal c.2004, Friendster c.2006, MySpace c.2008, and Facebook and Twitter currently, I suspect Facebook would appear much less the unstoppable force/immovable object you're making it out to be.
I'm acquainted with hundreds of people like your roommate, and I'm aware that normal people don't give a shit about our geeky critiques of Facebook. What I was trying to communicate is that they likely won't bail on Facebook for those reasons, but they might because there are too many annoying people on Fb, or they don't want to get Faceskyped by their mom, or something that's more interesting or lower friction comes along, or other people move for a variety of reasons and they just follow.
FB won social networking. Game over.
I hate to put it this way, but what are you doing on HN? Seriously. I thought we'd all read The Innovator's Dillema. Nobody wins anything for long, the game's never over. That's sort of the point of capitalism.
I hate to put it this way, but what are you doing on HN? Seriously.
I apologize if I offended you, Ryan. All I am asking for is for an example of one company that had reach the sort of mass FB has (coupled with a total dominance in its vertical)and ended up loosing to a competitor. Enlighten me.
Yahoo was a portal that was made "irrelevant" by Google. Google was not in the portal business. This is what happens when a company comes in and changes user behavior. In other words Google did not build a better portal, they build something that made portals irrelevant over time.
Youngsters today and the lack of history being taught in schools. History is full of winners, who after a period of time became losers (or at least not the same level of winning).
So what is your point exactly? That the only reason people will stay on Facebook is that they already are on Facebook? By this logic they never would have gotten on Facebook in the first place, because Facebook started out empty, and everybody already was somwhere else, say MySpace, and ICQ/AIM/YIM/MSN before that.
I'm not convinced. I caught up with a couple of friends recently, not the geekiest crowd, but all but one have Android devices. The Android owners now live in googleverse, and none are on Facebook more often than they check their gmail. I also know a fair amount of people who check Facebook once a week or rarer. My aunt, who is just discovering that she can forward me funny pictures via email, contacts me from her Yahoo account. The rest of the world? Not quite.
Facebook doesn't need to have competitive features they only need to have comparative features. Google+ has video chat, now Facebook does. It doesn't matter that Hangout is better. People don't switch social networks based on any single feature.
I think the proper question should be "For how long do you really think that attitude will allow them to maintain their dominance?". Maybe Facebook is in the positions where playing catch-up is good enough for them in the midterm.
What do you think Facebook should have built/announced?
Pretty much all of the really useful features are also big privacy violators, and with the uncertainty around how the public views social networking privacy, FB is smart to wait and let Google make the first move.
You know logic says they won't be able to maintain their dominance but history shows that things don't always follow logically. It's going to be super interesting what plays out next.
IMO it won't be their tech or attitude that will bring an eventual end to their dominance but shear fashion. Trend following. If Google position themselves and look cool and capture the "cool kids" then FB will lose out to them (to some extent). FB is already getting a little taint, it's run a good innings in internet time.
Whichever, G+ or FB, manages to capture the buzz of "hangouts with famous people" will probably take the current round. This to me is the iteration of one of Twitter's big wins; the chance to rub shoulders with "stars".
For me, and I suspect most here, such things don't really matter. I'll stay with FB as long as most of my friends are there and it works reasonably well.
I sent my wife the intro link for Google+ when they launched and she couldn't even be bothered to check it out. Why? Because everyone she knows is on facebook.
If her friends move, then she'll move. It'll probably annoy her to have to switch too.
And every of her friends will move if the other friends move, etc. But in reality, it is enough if only one of her friends, the most influential one moves, and then all the worker bees will follow.
> Because everyone she knows is on facebook.
But why is everyone on facebook in the first place? Because one of them, the group leader, the early adopter, the trend setter, decided first, then the rest passively followed. If the trend setter again decides to go G+, the effort to move off Facebook will be less then losing the queen bee, so they will follow again.
From a technical implementation perspective maybe Hangout is better. However, from a social networking perspective 3/4 of a billion Skype users is clearly better. And from a marketing perspective, giving Skype users worldwide a reason to choose Facebook over competing products is brilliant.
Facebook didn't have to be very good when their main competitors were MySpace and Friendster, two poster children for incompetence who blew early leads in quick succession while at times appearing to be run by circus clowns. Fortunately for Facebook success is relative: for a site whose primary purpose is to manage your social network it's been sorely lacking in any credible tools to manage social networks. Facebook is basically Geocities with comments and photo-sharing. Now Zuck and Co are going to actually have to put some thought into it.
One of the reasons for FB's victory was that its design is staid, standard, but stable compared to the script injection nightmare that MySpace's customization turned into. For all of Zuckerberg's youthful personality (at least as portrayed by the media), it almost feels like Facebook has had a dry corporate juggernaut type ethos from the beginning. FB didn't so much innovate as much as it dominated by creating a cleaner, better-ordered social network. No wonder its color scheme is big blue.
FB became quite awesome when they integrated Friendfeed's technology and the stream became quick and much more transparent in terms of usability.
At the same time, when Buzz came out, it was even faster and cleaner. Just not placed in the right context. There must have been some lessons and technology learned from Buzz.
Facebook just works pretty darn well, though. The application is almost always responsive, it's extremely polished, and it's always getting a bit stronger in what it offers.
You're a lucky one I guess, or I'm unlucky. Facebook has constant little issues, whether it's just plain slow, the back button doesn't do anything, clicking a link doesn't do anything, chat is always on the fritz, or some other annoyance.
I'm curious as to what set of the features you use, because I seem to have chosen a set with the opposite experience: responsiveness is often spotty, polish is lacking, and the offering seems to be getting weaker if anything. That said, maybe the new offerings will help fix some of that, but I'm not particularly sanguine.
I certainly does _not_ work pretty darn well. A couple examples of high-impact bugs:
- Repeated posts in the news feed. The first ~10 posts or so in the news feed are repeated as you scroll down.
- In the news feed, if I see and play a video, it plays. Great. If I continue going down the feed and then click on a photo, it goes into the "theater" mode, and for some obscure reason, it plays the video again (except I cannot see it; I can only hear it). The only way to stop it is to exit theater mode. This keeps happening over and over again every time I enter theater mode. I am then forced to refresh the entire page if I want to see some pictures without distracting noise in the background.
These are just a couple examples; there are many more. After talking to some friends, it seems I'm not the only one experiencing them. Now, nobody's perfect. It's OK if these bugs got into production for a few days or even weeks before getting fixed. But it's been months now... For a company full of brilliant engineers, that is unacceptable.
Yes, it's odd. I agree with you, from my perspective, Facebook has 100% uptime and virtually no bugs. It's as good as Google (maybe better since GMail is often crappy for me.) It's clear that others see very different things. I wonder what the difference is?
(Now the Facebook iPhone app is really buggy, I will give you that.)
Facebook's quality seems to be directly linked to their need to acquire users. When they started out they were excellent — I remember being very impressed that a social network could be this nice. Now that everyone uses them, they have no hunger for quality.
The presentation seemed a little lackluster. It's like FB + Skype were planning a big surprise and then Google dropped a bigger one with G+ last week and FB/Skype were left standing, shouting "us too!" but with a smaller product + feature set.
Is it me or does Zuckerberg really excel at being boring? I guess I don't watch many CEOs announce new products but that was painfully boring and pedantic.
His voice is a bit whiny, and that isn't helping. But I think it's also the slide-show based presentation. And the repeatedly talking about how awesome his partners and employees are. We get it. We didn't come here for that. We want to be shown the exciting features.
I understand fully his motives, drum up support and excitement about his IPO, but no matter how hard he tries, he does not have Jobs charisma or skill. He should start getting it by reading Nancy Duarte's books on presentations.
Most just don't liveblog it. The only point of the presentation is so that a few journalists can feel more privileged over those who get press release saying the same thing.
While I can appreciate (in fact, I probably don't) the technical difficulty of delivering a chat/video service to a userbase of 750M; these simply aren't compelling innovations for most (especially younger) people. Of particular note, these features aren't sticky (the usability of these features is common to _many_ other services) nor do they raise particularly high barriers to entry for competitors (Google has already nailed these services at large scales, integrating them into G+ is probably trivial). What FB (or Google for that matter) needs to nail is social search based on the graph of what your friends are doing/reading/buying... this is one area where FB has a distinct early advantage (they have more mature social graphs). I'm convinced social search will be the single feature that displaces or entrenches FB, not chat.
Index technology is very well-known and pretty straightforward. You crawl the web. The quality of your search results are a function of your algorithm, and the depth/breadth of your index (created by this crawling). Blekko is attempting to outsource the algorithm part. Rather than play the cat and mouse game with spam sites, why not let power-users define what the best is, and then only return those results to others. Integrating the social graph is actually an incredibly powerful and compelling way to do search.
If I search for "digital camera", it might help a bit but if I were looking for the opinions of my photographer friends, I'd just ask them.
If I search for "us air strikes in libya" it might help but I would expect an algorithm to be able to find me some decent news articles without too much help from my friends. Besides, I don't want to live in my friends' 'filter bubble'.
If I search for "AT91SAM9G20 datasheet", I doubt anyone in my immediate social graph has even seen what I'm looking for, let alone +1'd it.
If I search for "AT91SAM9G20 datasheet", I doubt anyone in my immediate social graph has even seen what I'm looking for, let alone +1'd it.
That's true, but then how many competing documents are going to pop up? The social graph helps give precedence when their are many results.
The Libya example is interesting. If you want outside of your bubble there is no reason you couldn't reverse the order and try to see news that none of your friends have seen (or at least +1ed).
> this is one area where FB has a distinct early advantage (they have more mature social graphs).
Doesn't not having a search engine trump having a big social graph when it comes to search? Building search engines is not trivially easy. It took Microsoft 10 years to get it right.
Most people's social graphs are too small (130 people) to be useful. Well we will use an extended social-graph, you might say, but if you are extending the social-graph, why not include the entire internet? Why would my social-graph contain better (more accurate and relevant) information about doing a thing than doathing.com?
The social-graph is a reduced set of the internet. It is probably easier to search, but how will the results be better than Google?
There's a lot of room between the average user's social graph and the entire internet. I think if you got the best 20% of the internet compiled intelligently based on your social graph, you'd be in good shape.
You have control of your own social graph, you don't have control over who puts a page up for Google to crawl. You're using the authority someone has as part of your network to filter what comes in to the network - search only on sites that friends-of-friends have recommended and you're unlikely to get spam or sites that are hard to navigate or that won't provide a good service. If I'm looking for new outdoor equipment I could look at the online stores that fellow scouts have used and recommended and so save time weeding out the better stores.
Just my immediate reaction to your question. There are clearly benefits in both types of search. Also this presupposes that FB aren't trying to inject advertised offerings in to your social-graph based search; probably a bad assumption as that there looks like gold to me.
I think you are mistaking how to integrate the social graph into search. You don't do it by exclusively searching within the social graph, you use the social graph to augment your traditional search. The best way for me to show you what I mean is for you to look at the attempts blekko is making. Create an account, and connect your facebook profile, wait 1 hour, and then do searches with "/likes" appended. You'll still get mostly normal results but the instances where a friend has liked a site will be featured more prominently. Facebook has not been able to "just make a search engine" with the social graph because making a traditional search engine is a non-trivial challenge.
Hasn't google already taken a huge step towards this with their +1 initiative (which is obviously tied to G+)?
With Google's velocity, I think they're probably going to get to "social search" first (good luck to Blekko, but reliance on FB is not going to scale - especially when FB looks to monetize - social search is their meal ticket).
I don't see any products, there. I just see a couple of lame features. Skype and group chat. Skype already does Skype, so I'm not sure why I'd load up Facebook just so I could skype through a webpage, instead. My IM client has done group chat for years, so I'm not sure why I'd load up facebook just so I could chat with a group of those people, either.
This kind of falls in line with my confusion as to why people ruin their websites with all these components and hooks into Facebook. They claim that they need Facebook Likes and Logins and Discussions in their websites, because Facebook drives traffic. Even if they hate it, they have to succumb to it. You know, for generating traffic. My question remains - why do you want to try appealing to a group of people to whom Facebook is "the internet" and who do everything through Facebook? Those people aren't going to make a point of going to your website again, unless someone links them to it a second time down the road. It seems like a lot of resources (not to mention website screen real-estate) given up for very little desirable return.
It’s for people who already spend a lot of time on Facebook. They don’t have to bother anymore using dedicated software. Simple as that. You are looking at it from the wrong perspective.
He's clearly being purposefully obstructive in his comments. Obviously if you're on FB already then why open Skype, why open an IM client, that's how integration works.
The parent is asking the equivalent of why you'd add maps to google when you have a perfectly good road map out in the car.
FB chat has a jabber interface. It can be used by those of us who don't sit on FB all day too. Pretty convenient. Now, I hope they'll get the group chat working via jabber too.
There are many people (including me) who have been using the internet for a very very very long time and don't see facebook as the internet even though we use it.
And I can see that I get quite a few sign-ups to my service that way.
Also the problem is not as much whether people use it for traffic generation. The problem is when they only use it for that.
I am actually beginning to consult my clients on how to build their own digital ecosystems so that they don't leave all the value inside the gates of facebook, twitter etc. but rather attempt to get the value transfered back inside their own ecosystem.
Once you start seeing it that way things start to look very different.
When I was in high school, almost everyone used AIM. Then Facebook Chat came out and practically crushed it. Why? It wasn't better (it was far, far, worse, actually — you couldn't chat with somebody without one of you complaining about it), but everyone was there. It became the defacto way to reach people. It was successful for the same reason Facebook was successful.
This is exactly why I turned chat off. I have no desire to be contacted by old high school classmates who happen to be bored and browsing facebook, and see me pop up.
You can set up a friends list, and turn on chat only for that friends list, if you like. Set up the friends list at https://www.facebook.com/friends/edit/ and then click the little settings icon at the bottom right (in the new chat design) and choose "Limit availability...".
With the old chat design, choose chat at the bottom right, then the "Friend lists" menu item in the chat window, and add the friends list you want to affect chat availability, and then turn availability on/off to particular lists.
Useful for parents and work colleagues who don't use other IM or who you don't want to give your personal IM accounts to.
I think this discussion made me realize that I want there to be a minimum barrier to contacting me in a way that requires instant feedback. I don't care who has my e-mail address because I can reply to e-mail on my own time and terms, but I'd rather people have to do a little work to contact me via IM, and I want it to be pretty hard for people to casually call me just to chat.
Yes but people who are bored and browsing Facebook and don't follow technology minute by minute, outnumber people like us by a huge margin. Facebook launching these three (not so new) features just means that its making video calling more accessible to other people, which means its probably going to work for them.
(Personally, I still feel surprised whenever I see anyone even using Facebook chat.)
I use Facebook chat to talk to close friends because sometimes it's more convenient than picking up a phone to talk to someone out of the country. Allows for more random conversations. Having the Skype feature is an added bonus, no one's requiring you to use it. Just because FB chat is more buggy, that doesn't mean the convenience doesn't highly outweigh the disadvantages. Logging into a different chat client would be for chat-only, while FB isn't.
It's making it slightly more accesible. People you generally would be willing to make a video call to are probably already on your skype, phone, or other contacts.
Look into facebook groups. A bit of a pain to setup (especially compared to circles) - but it gives you quick ways to limit the news-feed to only a subset of friends or to limit who can see you online.
Then don't use it! Seriously, you said the problem was that you didn't want anyone contacting you. But the fact is that FB does this quite well, and it's not that much work. And, it's damn convenient. I, awhile ago, basically switched over to it completely, as it integrates into my Jabber client quite nicely. Now people know if they want to contact me, they should use FB IM.
Maybe it's just me, but there seems to be a 10 year gap in your IM technology timeline there. AIM straight to Facebook? Was I the only one using ICQ, MSN, Google Chat before Facebook came along?
You may have been one of the few using ICQ and MSN after AIM. ICQ was much earlier in the chronology (we used to play with it when we got bored on IRC) and no one used MSN. :-P
Indeed. I don't know about today, but back in 2006 MSN was as popular as AIM and Yahoo! worldwide and particularly strong in certain areas -- there are some countries where it was even a verb ("I'll MSN you"). But then MS changed the name to "Windows Live Messenger", underinvested, and prioritized search instead. Ah well.
is.
I was just all over Central and South America, and internet cafes were always full of high school kids, every single screen full of MSN chat windows.
My understanding is that MSN was/is the most popular IM service most everywhere but the US (because of AIM?) and East Asia (where they have their own regionally popular services, like QQ in China).
I think this is somewhat regional. I'm from Canada, and no one I know uses AIM. MSN seems to be the most common chat program, although Skype is increasing in popularity.
When I was in school everyone used MSN and then later when I switched AIM. Still use them, because those people are still there. Have really mostly ignored facebook chat, and fbchat also does not show user status messages.
They've basically just brought facebook chat on par with instant messengers from the 2000s except you have to install something additional for video chat.
IM is always running in the background. Facebook requires going to the website and logging in and monitoring it. And being "available" to a huge swath of people. Not to mention, all of my colleagues and co-workers are on IM. I'm not going to reach out to a colleague to ask about a client via facebook chat and I'm not going to communicate with a client via facebook, instead of IM.
In short, Facebook likely contains everyone you've ever met or dealt with in person or online and "friended" that can potentially chat with you -- IM likely contains only the people you actually need to chat with.
"Everyone is there" is becoming an increasingly poor reason to justify selling your soul to a particular social network (as an individual or a business).
Yea I was surprised they put the "show most chatty friends in chat list" as a product. That seems like a very small feature. Adding people to group chat? I thought you could already do this, but I don't really use Facebook chat too much. Seems very underwhelming to say the least.
It looks to me like GOOG FB and Apple are trying to get to video calls and own them before the phone companies wake up and realize how valuable their own social graph is. So far the carrier's have had a gold mine and wasted the opportunity.
All your friends are on Facebook, so you don't have to search/find them on Skype. N-to-N video communication is now much easier. Default will be to use FB rather than the Skype client, especially once they add voice calls, conference calls, and group video chat.
The very first feature they show. Is the one that Skype implemented which a lot of people hated. Personally I think it's a great great feature. But it is a feature.
Unfortunately, I think it flows the other way. "Normal" users will probably use it, and some techies may use it too just because their "normal" friends use it.
I think I will never use it because I almost dont use video chat (Hangout can change that) but I see my mother using it to talk with her sisters. She currently uses Skype, but using only Facebook will be much easier for her.
MS can't/doesn't need to acquire facebook. they have a large stake in the company due to their early stage $270m investment. Facebook is too expensive at this point for MS to buy.
It should also be noted that Facebook chat works within Windows Live Messenger 2011 and you receive Facebook notifications (or birthday updates) from within Hotmail. So Microsoft has been working with Facebook for some time now.
They're forming tagteams? I wonder if any other partnerships will emerge.
I also said Microsoft Skype to distinguish it from FB- didn't know that FB and MS have been collaborating. But on second thought, it really is going to be Microsoft Skype from here on out. Or rather, 2012 Microsoft Skype Home Edition 7 with .NET Windows Live integration.
That's not even worth wasting time at answering. Look Google doing a great job of rebranding it's services. Google already had video chat for a while now. If you have gmail you have video chat. I don't get why facebook is just getting around to doing it. And google didn't need skype to do it.
On the order of 200 000. Mark Zuckerberg has 44871 followers on Google+, so there are clearly at least 44871 users, but probably not more than a few times that.
Yesterday, though, he had 35000 followers. That growth rate clearly can't continue; at that rate, + would overtake FB in another month or two, and the entire world population 5 days later.
Despite all of the hype about video chat and circles versus lists, to me the big announcement looks like group chat - which seems kind of stupidly obvious. Thinking about it, Google may have missed the mark by throwing video into the equation - unlike is the case with video, when people don't have to get dressed to be part of a discussion based on text. It almost looks like Google heard that Facebook was working on group features and video and assumed that they would be integrated.
I may be mistaken, but I think that's part of the idea with G+; you post an update to a specific circle and you basically have a chat with that circle.
Gmail has had group chat for a long time. G+ has it on the mobile app, and really you could join a hangout and use the text chat feature for group chat as well (even without a mic/webcam). I'm not sure why the G+ in-browser gchat doesn't support group chat, but I would guess it probably will.
So it does. I have it signed out (I don't need my gchat's going to 4 different places), so I turned it on briefly and failed to notice that. Thanks for pointing that out!
OK, the question I have here is about monetization. Who will get more money from this deal - Facebook or Microsoft/Skype and how? Skype has not been profitable for so many years (although they charge for phone calls and have ads), and I don't see this moving it closer to the goal.
Also, if FB allows group video-chat for free why would I pay Skype the subscription fee - I will just call from Facebook.
I think it's quiet interesting how quickly things change and how you see companies differently and google reinvented their image in such a short period of time.
If you asked me a year ago if I would say which was the cooler, younger, more innovative and most promising company - Google or Facebook - I would have said 4:0 Facebook for sure.
Now, I would say:
Cooler? I have a passion for design - so Google+ is by far winner here. In addition, you can say what you want, but with the invitation restriction they got what they wanted - buzzed.
Younger? When you compare the new design from Google to the Facebook design and consider the implementation of cutting edge web technology (advanced html5 etc.) - for sure it's google!
More innovative? Of course Facebook has a point for focusing the development of a framework in which other companies can build on - but on the other hand, that's by definition not much innovation by themselves - so google+!
Most promising? Only time can tell..
I don't know exactly why I see Google in a whole new light now.
Maybe it's because of their stunning design and UX (sorry for repeating, but it's gorgeous), maybe it's because of their underdog position with Google+ or maybe it's because Facebook with it's dry and subtle and boring design and it's cooperations with "uncool" players like microsoft is not taking risks anymore. They cannot risk their large userbase and got to stay mainstream. That could be the chance for Google+ to conquer, at least, the younger crowd.
The comment stream is interesting, particulary because I've been seeing a lot of "google + hasn't made any impact outside tech circles" type comments around the place. People are looking at this just as Google would like them too.
Considering they had to have known about G+ for a while before it launched, you would think they would really hit something out of the park in terms of competitive features. These are all pretty lackluster, imho.
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