Th3 Core
Why We Are Here => Traffic => Topic started by: littleman on March 15, 2012, 08:04:01 PM
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A pretty damning article from an ex-google employee who now works at microsoft.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx
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A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, “social isn’t a product,” she told me after I gave her a demo, “social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.
dead on, that one..
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>dead on, that one..
Yes. Exactly. The only reason I stay on FB is because my friends are there. If they all moved somewhere else I would probably migrate too.
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>If they all moved somewhere else I would probably migrate too.
That's essentially what happened to myspace. I think it could happen to FB too if there were a perfect storm, but I don't think G+ is it.
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I'm still not convinced that is the aim of g+
Funny though. My take away from that article was more "shareholders killed google" than "google+ killed google".
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G employees (especially Schmidt, Page and Brin) still hold most of the power there (split voting rights etc) so I'm not sure the "shareholders made us do it" argument works. They were scared of FB, so they did "something social". Badly. FB competes with them for ad dollars, and (for now) can provide quality ad space that G can't, though G still has the advantages of quantity and depth
I've argued elsewhere that FB is intrinsically worthless. The only real value they possess is their users, and users are shockingly low down the list of priorities, so I'm pretty sure it's all going to go horribly wrong one day. We'll see.
>> and answering individually isn’t scaling so here it is
Heh, typical Googler response
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Yes. Exactly. The only reason I stay on FB is because my friends are there. If they all moved somewhere else I would probably migrate too.
What if they migrated nowhere? In other words, what if what has happened to, say, the New York Times happened to Facebook. That is, people didn't migrate into The Washington Post, they migrated into a distributed system beyond central control.
In other words, what are the chances that something like Disapora or some other distributed social network takes off? I'm perhaps polluted by having just finished reading Vernor Vinge's Randbows End, but it seems to like in the long term it's inevitable. The question is whether that term is 10 years, or 20 years.
I would say Facebook is practically untouchable in five years, possibly at risk in 10 years, and 20 years... well, the general public web isn't even that old yet, so I expect protocols and platforms I haven't even considered and the survival of FB will depend on whether or not they are a cog for those protocols, a spoke, or stuck out with a segment of the rim.
https://joindiaspora.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_social_network
I don't know whether the final threat to FB will take that form, but it seems more likely at this point to seeing it destroyed by a mega-rival in the same way that the importance of Windows has declined not because someone else came up with the killer OS, but because thousands of people came up with tools and experiences that don't depend on a particular OS.
So, in that metaphor, I see Google here as building Mac OS X, while the real threat to Facebook is the web (if that makes any sense at all).
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Google wanted Google + to hoover user data, nothing more. Perhaps that was obvious from the start, which is why it's never gotten anywhere.
Google have tried social on a number of platforms over the years, but it's never worked. Nothing Google does outside of search has really worked for Google - except for Chrome or Android, both of which are just free software, and don't tie users into *paid* Google products like Apple does. And while Chrome and Android are user-data collection tools, Amazon has shown that they can take Google's open-source and replace Google's data-collection in lieu of themselves.
I can understand the ex-employee's stand - but really, didn;t they just wake up and smell the coffee that we've all been drinking for years - that Google is an advertising company, nothing more, and any pretence otherwise was just that? Maybe even the Google Kool Aid is no longer working so well and that was the problem ...
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Google say G+ isn't about Facebook, its about integration of everything including offline.
Which sort of sounds a bit like facebook. But I believe they mean they shouldn't be judged by whether they 'steal' facebook members, but by whether they achieve joined-up ness......
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Okurt, Wave, now google plus, third times a charm and this one seems to be more popular than the rest but still I feel one thing has run throughout, no personality and I think it is only half as successful because they force you to have a profile to use youtube, facebook pisses off people too much and plus ones feed back directly to google. As a networking platform I feel is soulless and doesn't fit with a winning social engagement model, which is all about owning a personal space and connecting with people you want to hear from, main focus is education on G+ not relationships.
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Too bad. I really wanted to like G+. I was hoping it would be the straw that broke FB's back. Then I had the same aspirations for Diaspora. What's next?
G+ is actually not a bad place for a brand page. I throw up company press releases and related news links and get a ton of people circling me. The management love the little company icon that shows in the SERPs. The content ranks quicker than my own a lot of the time too (which is a bothersome, but not insurmountable issue).
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dead on, that one..
Dead on, couldn't agree more, but...
Now the rich kid owns all the party venues, the directions on how to get there, so you just have to stop by the rich kids party whether you like it or not.