The initial buzz over Google Plus is wearing off. This is probably because it is losing its novelty status while still being incomplete in some areas, such as being unable to adequately serve business users. It is, after all, still in beta.
Meanwhile Facebook hasn’t been sitting idle. The latest slew of features added to Facebook were clearly an attempt to make staying at Facebook a more attractive option to moving to Google+, and on top of that they have the power of inertia on their side. Most users have all of their friends on Facebook, and might have a hard time convincing all of them to just jump ship, plus it is a familiar platform.The most widely known advantage of Google+, their Circles feature, is actually something that has existed in Facebook in form of “Lists” for a long time. The advantage wasn’t so much that Google had this and Facebook didn’t, it was just that Google made it dead easy and Facebook made it obscure and comparably complicated.However, people who are attracted to the Google Circles, but affected by the hassle of moving to it wholesale, will probably invest what little effort it may take to discover the Lists feature embedded in Facebook. Couple that with Facebook’s effort to make this easier and I can easily see this particular advantage gap being mostly closed. As it stands now, lists can be created and managed with fair ease on the “Edit Friends” page.
Latest Facebook update already made some strides towards making Facebook more like Google in terms of user friendliness, as is evident from their replacing the lock menu on the status update form with a “Friends” or “Public” menu depending on whom you want to share to. There’s also a Custom option which allows selecting specific friends. A lock wasn’t very descriptive, and probably didn’t get much attention, but this might fare a little better.
Aside from Facebook’s own efforts to compete, there is still this whole issue over real names which Google isn’t really backing off from, and as GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram points out, this is because Google wants Google+ to be an “identity service”. For this they need your real identity, not pseudonyms.
Reading the GigaOm article reminded me of Google as a company of engineers again, whose primary concern after all is said and done, is to serve some kind of an ultimate technical objective. If this objective within Google is understood as something like “collect real user data to use in our identity services” then that will color their priorities, and worst of all, how they describe this new social network of theirs, as is evident from what Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) apparently told Andy Carvin in an interview, according to Carvin’s words:
“He replied by saying that G+ was build primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names if they’re going to build future products that leverage that information.”
I have to wonder then, how much better is this than Facebook’s stance on privacy? It doesn’t really seem like Google is all that much more concerned for their users than Facebook is. Really, why should that ever be a shocker anyway?
The bigger problem is the fact that Google already has a lot of people hooked on a myriad of its services, from Google Search, Docs, Maps, Adsense, Analytics to YouTube and Android, all of which are tied to a singular Google Account. Now add a social network to the mix and, as I argued before, this might be a little too much leverage and trust to provide one company.
This is precisely the argument I would give to those who welcome Google+ as competition to Facebook, so as to prevent Facebook having a monopoly. Welcoming Google as a provider of this “healthy competition” might be sort of like welcoming Microsoft’s foray into the internet browsers market back when Netscape was dominant. MS was already too powerful in other areas, and had too much leverage. I’m not saying these two cases are entirely analogous, but some elements apply. I’d love to see a competitor to Facebook, but it would be better if it arose from an independent company.I like seeing Google+ push people to demand better social networking features and pressure Facebook to improve, but I’m not quite as keen on seeing Google go beyond that and actually become the one to overtake Facebook.
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