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.
I wish people would stop comparing G+ and Facebook. Even though Google+ has a social network app, G+ is really the identity and behavior-tracking glue of a horizontally integrated system. I wouldn't be surprised if G+ the social network remained a niche product and was viewed as a failure, while G+ the identity and behavior aggregator became a shashing success.
That's the benefit of hindsight. Facebook was built as a startup and grew fast. G+ is being developed in a fully-fledged company with way more resource.
Agree, though that Fb could be working harder on this!
Being the size Google is, I sometimes wonder why it took them so long to come up with an alternative to Facebook. If they had of launched Google+ back in 2005 or 2006 I think they would have had a decent chance against Facebook but launching in 2011 was just a bad business move.
Facebook is successful because of its highly engaging product.
G+ is kind of like a trust fund kid: it has 200M users because its rich parents(google) decided to aggressively push it to their millions of users. Their 200M user-base says very little about G+ as a product.
It's such a shame. G+ has so much potential but unless everyone joins the game it won't succeed. Facebook really has a TERRIBLE User Experience compared to G+
Let's hope it won't end in a new Bing vs. Google situation
g+ was dead the day they released it, I've said in a comment here before and I stand by it: google cannot launch a successful social product (where successful means it's a valid competitor to Facebook). They are too big, people put all their hopes and dreams on specific things happening which are unrealistic and they prematurely kill the product. Google could make a better product than Facebook but it would never take off and "beat" Facebook.
Even I love G+ on principle, but that's the point, in principle. The problem with G+ goes deep, first of all, they just assumed that a network gets traction because of beautiful UI, it is not the case, if you look at facebook's growth, it started as a way to talk and later as a dev platform, because of farmville and games like that they get a lot of traffic, so essentially facebook means different things to different people.
When fb came into existence there wasn't much of a competitor to it, so they focused on making it easy to use and stuff, later, when g+ was being created they misread the entire picture. At that point fb had become a platform or was becoming a platform. Currently, FB has different users, some use it as a buy sell group, some for messenger, some for playing games (APIs) etc
g+ didn't focus on good things, just beautiful UI doesn't mean you win, you have to differentiate yourself, they should have gone this way, start a private beta, build a terrific API for developers, so devs will flock to your platform and build apps on it, plus the circles stuff, it is great for geeks like us, but not so much for my grandma, who doesn't even know what google means. Plus, g+ takes an awfully large amount of time to load on slow network. Overall. Plus they don't have an end vision.
Honestly, I'm failing to see how G+ is a "creature of vision". Sure, it has a couple new and unique features - circles, chat, etc. But most of it is a direct copy of Facebook! Profile and feed are two examples where Facebook has innovated to establish itself as a strong identity provider, and G+ blatantly copied those features.
I'm not blaming Google for doing that. In fact, were I in their position I would be doing the exact same thing. But it's silly to claim that Facebook doesn't innovate. I'm not sure if people are just so used to ideas like the News Feed that they don't see it, but a couple years ago Facebook created that feature and it led to an explosion of social communication on their site.
It's also worth pointing out that Facebook's mission statement is "to make the world more open and connected". If you look at their products from that perspective, I think they start more like "Win!" and less like "Fail!"
I really hate how Facebook killed the competition because there's no place to go besides G+, and that seems to be targeting a different audience than Facebook. :(
Just because a company is big doesn't mean it has to sell out and stop caring about user privacy.
I read an essay on HN few weeks ago which said that the problem with G+ was that the higher mgmt at Google thought FB is famous because of a nicely designed product (rather than network effect), so they released a good product G+, it is somewhat a good product but it missed the train. Plus it has circles, it isn't intuitive.
I really wanted them to be. They definitely have enough talent to have been so. The way they described themselves, they were exactly what I was looking for. But (my opinion only) they turned out to be full of bullshit and meh.
But the majority of G+ users are probably going to disagree with me. They may not ever be a serious competitor to Facebook (and who says they need to be?), but they probably will make a lot of money with it.
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.
reply