Google+ is out and it looks nice. Will it kill Facebook? This is question that many people argue passionately on either side of.
While it is very difficult for Facebook to die it might lose it's crown. The argument that Facebook Is too big to fail relies mainly on 2 pillars: facbook's numbe of users is too huge (750 mn) and that it is too integrated into media, content and e-commerce (think about the thousands of magazine, movies and commerce websites that have the Facebook like or share buttons).
The upcoming threat is coming from google which did a really good job with design. The even mashed Facebook and twitter together in their network. Coming from google also means try have enough muscle power to bring in millions of users in no time. Furthermore, integrating their social network into meia, content, ecommerce and others will be a piece of cake.
While myspace lost it's crown dramatically to facebook and moved rapidly from king to pauper, Facebook is highly unlikely to end up in the same way. This is simply because while Facebook introduced a whole new social platform with tons of more interactions versus myspace, google+ yet has not done that. However, if they continue pushing the interface in the same way and end up with a mature interface that is just slightly more appealing than Facebook, the latter might end up being a prince.
4 comments:
The Facebook versus Google+ is really an interesting debate, especially when it comes to tackling privacy issues.
Google+ has been touted to deliver user friendly, personalizable and better privacy controls, something which Facebook seemed to lack as per many reports. Whether G+ is as good as it has touted to be remains to be seen. Its integration with Google search will be a big concern for privacy. As of today, Google search is the Internet. In Facebook, with the proper settings you could prevent anything ever appearing on Google search. Though when you sign up for G+, your Google profile becomes public. There isn't a control yet to make the profile picture album private. With Google search being synonymous with the Internet, this lack of privacy option could be a big cause for concern.
In addition, Picasa now has decreased privacy options as well
Google made the below changes
- Albums you've shared can in turn be tagged and 'shared' by others.
- For new albums, anyone an album is shared with can see who else it is shared with.
- When you tag someone, they receive a notification and can see the photo 'and the related album'
Another potential problem for Google+ could be the limited number of invites strategy. This has worked in the past to create buzz for products as Gmail, but a social network is only as good as the connections you have in it. With users waiting for their friends to join and hence facing empty streams in their feeds, they would eventually lose interest and return to facebook for their daily friends' update.
In its current form, I don't think G+ will last too long. Hype and buzz is good, but with the high standards set by Google, and the high expectations from the public, I believe G+ needs to deliver much better privacy controls, and deliver fast.
google+ is like a mix of email and twitter. I think its quite different from facebook or simply the email. And I heard that google + will require you to disclose your name and gender when you are using it, which is similar to facebook.
I think there are two key reasons that Google + could be here to stay.
First off, Google + has a fundamentally different paradigm than Facebook with regards to "friends." Facebook assumes a binary relationship between
people and friends whereas Google + attempts to differentiate the myriad of relationships between individuals by their creation of circles.
Second, already a couple weeks old, Google + is already gaining traction. Even though it is still in closed beta, it has close to 20mm users.
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