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 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.
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.
All true. However surely Google want to deliver an intuitive and easy to use social media tool to their end users. I thought G+ is for the mass market - maybe it isn't.
Google+ is definitely not intuitive and during their recent upgrade have ripped off Facebook's profile and cover photo idea.
Personally, I don't see Google+ as an FB clone either. Awarding FB the 'rights' to social networking features is reminiscent of a non-deserved software patent - the functionality of FB is not unprecedented, non-obvious or original. Their success is in bringing it all together in one place successfully. Talking to friends and sharing materials with them is a natural way that people are going to use the internet.
When I heard about G+ my thoughts were along the same lines as the recent posts from MySpace's founder. Google has offered these services for years, but they have not been well integrated with each other or presented as a unified product. Overall Picasa, Buzz, Profiles and so on have not been branded or marketed well. Putting these together makes sense. I'm glad Google has done it and I'm pleased to see it's being well received.
What seems new for Google is how this is a 'real identity' network. There's a key difference between communities where one can choose between a real name, anonymity or a pseudonym, exemplified by sites likes on YouTube, Reddit or your average random web forum, vs. the Facebook style where policy requires that you use your given name and have a single identity. Each style engenders a different dynamic, and has benefits or drawbacks. Maintaining the right to and acceptance anonymity on the internet is a quite important cultural issue in my opinion, however.
I definitely agree that Google and MS are very different companies, personality wise. MS's style is to copy competitors products, cargo-cult style, but miss the overall point. They seekt want to eliminate competition without really caring about the original point of the product - IE was just one in a long line of examples of this. They definitely don't care about improving the product after they eliminate the original, I suppose because the product or what it did was never the point. I don't think Google is like that at all... A company's behavior so often reflects the behavior of the people who run it at a high level, and the two founders of Google are not at all like Gates or Ballmer.
It is quite obvious that Google+ is far, far from perfect, and I don't think that it is going to make even the smallest dent in facebook's market-share. But that doesn't mean that many of the features that make it distinctive-- including Circles-- aren't a positive step forward. (If anything, if the "defining features" of + serve no other purpose than forcing facebook to integrate similar features, I'd call it a success).
Indeed, suggesting that Google+ is simply some sort of "copy" of facebook plus a few new features is a pretty short-sighted view of the service, as the entire model of Google+ is hugely different: instead of viewing one's social graph as one monolithic entity, Google+ views it as a series of graphs that are often intersecting and often entirely different. And that is very useful, especially for people who might want to be able to share things with their coworkers that are entirely different than what they share with their friends.
I'm not going to argue with the assertion that a great deal of Google+'s early "success" is simply due to "non stop hyping", rather than the service's actual strengths. But that doesn't mean that the strengths it does possess are somehow frivolous or meaningless. They simply aren't.
Simply put: sure, you might be happy sharing with email/dropbox, but a great deal of people would rather that our current social networks had a more granular view of sharing/following/etc. (this includes me). And I hardly think its fair to criticize them the way you have-- it is more than just "the early adopter crowd trying to make the masses using Facebook feel inferior for still using it" (indeed, many of the early adopters have been very critical of the service, even noting when facebook or twitter is superior-- see Jeff Jarvis' comments about how difficult it is to follow live events on G+[1]).
It is still far too early to tell whether G+ is a 'facebook killer'-- I strongly suspect that it isn't. But that doesn't mean that unfair poo-pooing of it simply because it is over-hyped is the right response. Both Twitter and facebook could learn a great deal from what Google has done, and I genuinely hope they do.
As I said above, if that happens, I for one will consider G+ a rather startling success.
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.
I don't know what you mean? The G+ UI is pretty good, certainly a lot better than Facebook was at the time when G+ launched. For a while, a lot of people were happy there, particularly in certain niches like photography.
It's a shame the implementation was so complex (apparently) that now it can't be easily maintained. This does seem to happen to Google a lot. It probably has more to do with too many resources, rather than not enough.
But maybe it's not simple to compete with Facebook. Maybe this has little to do with technology.
At first, I also thought it had to do with branding, and was infact, quite enthusiastic about G+. But then G+ launched, and I tried it, and about half of my friends also came ever to give it a try.
It just wasn't good enough. I've had people tell me that they go to G+ to escape from the madness that people apparently post on facebook. This 'madness', as the person quoted, was simply the fact that people post more personalised messages on facebook. I've yet to see that when it comes to G+, (and to be honest, the only reason I still visit is because of the HN circle).
So I guess you're right that branding is a part of it, but not big enough. Google thought compartmentalising everything with circles would be the answer, but is it really? People complain about facebook's privacy all the time, and yet, when G+ came with better options, they didn't just up and left.
To me, G+ is a good effort from Google. They've made a concerted attempt to add a social layer on top of the core Google products that have a unique take on social functionality and some manner of utility for users.
The problem comes down to engineering however - or more precisely, engineers.
I have always gotten the sense that G+ is a social network for "nerds". In this context, "nerds" refers to people that (like me) are:
1. More technically inclined than the average person
2. Willing to invest more time and effort into their social circles
3. Capable of grasping more abstract social concepts
4. Have an attention span longer than a gnat
While this is a very nice social network, G+ features are not designed for the instant grasp that Facebook has perfected. I think that FB's strategy of catering to the lowest common denominator - literally - in an elegant and usable way is what continues to cement their dominance over the space.
This latest redesign seems to be still very technically oriented, despite the pretty icons. The entire concept of reordering things is quite literally bunk when you get down to the average joe.
When are you going to reorder your icons on the left? What utility does it provide? As a regular user, you want something but the entire concept of moving stuff around on the screen isn't your priority. It is parsley on a dish, not the main course. Each G+ design feature I've seen so far continues to be just little bits of garnish, providing little in the way of truly useful functionality that makes the overall experience as a whole better in some way.
Of course, nothing is guaranteed in business and most certainly no one will be king of the hill forever. The world changes after all, and the generation that is being born now will utilize social media in a way we can barely imagine. However, that still doesn't change the fact that G+ as a whole seems to be an effort to make a social network for Googlers, not the world. We as HN readers should not gauge G+ by what we see through our own experience - we should gauge it by what our non-technical friends, family and random-acquaintances do, and that is how I'm gauging this design change right now (go FaceTime!).
Google wanted a pretty graph of humanity's friendships. So they worked really hard on making it nice to input those relationship through those pretty circles (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeMZP-oyOII).
But inputting those vertices in the graph does not benefit users, and they feel that. In Facebook, it worked because Facebook had focused on the users: they wanted to be someone's friend to use Facebook's communication tools. And Facebook had a great chat system and a competent publishing platform.
G+ never had a great chat system (Hangout always felt sluggish, obtrusive and undifferentiated, unlike GTalk and Facebook Messenger) and its publishing platform was subpar (Medium came six months later, Tumblr had been around for seven years, both have a much superior editor and offer a more pleasing reading experience).
You can't beat the competition with a lesser core product.
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.
Facebook didn't really create anything new when it launched, it was simply less annoying and more grown up than myspace. I'm already a heavy user of the Google stack (gmail, docs, maps, translate), so if G+ offers me a way to better integrate that while getting away from facebook's annoying immaturity, I can see myself as a regular user. What facebook does have right now is a reason to check it multiple times a day. G+ will get that if a lot of my friends start using it, but it doesn't appear to have that draw yet.
You see, G+ is doing exactly what Facebook does. The brands are basically duplicating their efforts for social interaction. I don't see any difference between how FB treats page creation versus Google Plus.
The entire purpose of G+ was as a reaction to Facebook and it was largely a clone of Facebook. It's not like they were developing their own product and just got screwed by timing, the entire concept and project was only possible in a Facebook-dominated world. Sure, if someone who cloned Product X had been able to release before that product, it would be better for them, but they never had the original idea so it seems moot.
I think it basically was the social reasons. The name is really clunky and corporate. It was never that cool or exciting to people. The lack of original inspiration and the obvious ham-handed attempt to move people from Facebook just made it fall flat.
Yes I think people often mistake that the goal of G+ was to compete or replace FB in people's daily lives. I think it was to make sure that Google has enough data to provide socially relevant targeting that FB claimed only they could provide at that time. And another was to establish a beachhead in social space as a contender should FB make a privacy or any other faux pas as they grow.
I think Google has largely succeeded in doing that.
I actually like G+ in principle. They already had the option to create a basic profile for your Google account which was good for those of us who already used Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Maps, etc. from them. I think they figured they had all of the pieces to make a "better Facebook" and compete in that space, but as you say, network effects are strong.
I know a ton of people who set up a G+ profile and I found both the web version and mobile app to be superior to Facebook's offering. Plus they had better image hosting and they had good text/video chat before FB updated theirs.
But in the end it comes down to critical mass of users (and particularly, non-early-adopters) on Facebook. You might get your other peers to try out a new service if you're into trying out new sites/services but unless you get everyone to make (and use) a profile the way most people seem to at least have a Facebook account, you're stuck maintaining two profiles on two sites and switching between them depending on who you want to share that update or photo or link with.
In the end it didn't matter if they had a modestly better site or mobile app because nobody wanted to post to two sites. And since, unlike email, these things don't operate on any sort of standard protocol, you can't just switch your client and let grandma keep using her old one so it fizzled as a FB competitor.
(I still use it for several niche interest groups though. Also I think circles are vastly superior to whatever Facebook has for granular control of who you share something with.)
The rapid growth of Google Plus compared to Facebook isn't really a valid comparison. When you are the number one site on the Internet (probably #1 or #2 email provider too?) and you add a new black bar to every page letting people know about your service, it's no surprise you gain X million users overnight. I agree with your thoughts that it's too early to count G+ as a failure just yet, but something about their rollout did cause it to lose steam. Most of my Facebook friends are aware G+ exists now... they just don't know why they should check it in addition to Facebook. It's the same problem any future search competitor has to Google, you have to be an order of magnitude better for people to switch.
This article seems to basically be a giant troll... if you can't see what problems Google+ claims to solve for a consumer, you aren't looking very hard. As far as I can see, there's two giant issues that G+ addresses and one that's arguably more important, but also more invisible.
1) It's not Facebook. Don't discount how much some people loathe FB as a company, and (in my opinion) rightfully so! They've made a business out of tricking users into accidentally over-sharing, they've engaged in some pretty stunning acts of censorship, and keep changing the UI in drastic steps that shock their existing userbase. (I have some sympathy with this last one, but it is a widespread complaint, nonetheless.)
2) In G+, privacy controls are manifest and obvious. There's little functionality in this realm that FB doesn't also offer, but it's not actively hidden from users on G+, but rather promoted to a primary feature of the UI.
The other thing that I think G+ does right is to get away from the "one-size-fits-all" model, under which every contact is a "friend". When you hear people saying "they're my Facebook friend, but not a real friend," it's clear that FB has flubbed it. G+, like Twitter and other such social media networks, allows for asymmetric contacts, which really lets the user control how they want to use the site.
Yep, I think you hit the nail on the head here. Facebook began with an expectation around an account tied to a real-life identity, and Google didn't. Google totally mis-read the cultural implications of integrating G+ into existing Google products.
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!"
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