This article is dead on. I already have many google apps open all day and g+ will integrate with those nicely. A friend already exclaimed this morning that the google apps integration is what will kill FB (if that's even possible - myspace still has users). He then set out to move over those he actually cared about on FB to g+.
I especially like default use of groups and how it forces users to think about privacy from the get go. This is very different from my FB experience years ago and why I quit using FB.
I think it's difficult to make the anti-trust case against Google.
Unlike Microsoft's control of the desktop, people choose to use Google everyday. It would be so very very easy to switch to Bing tomorrow (even easier than choosing not to use Facebook!) but people have chosen not to switch.
Just because you have a lot of marketshare doesn't mean you are a monopoly.
It's also quite easy to say that consumers will benefit from the increased competition with Facebook. This is what anti-trust tries to promote, not restrict.
Antitrust doesn't really on reason. It's a completely subjective law. In one breath you can be guilty because you have prices too low, in another because you have prices too high. Ultimately, it relies on how much pull you can exercise of politicians and bureaucrats.
I am not saying it's a good situation, just that that's reality.
That is likely the case, but technical fora tend to be overly concerned with "tying" (e.g. Internet Explorer or iTunes), while overlooking the indisputable fact that Microsoft did run a "trust".
MS had a set of legal contracts which gave them total control over PC distribution and pre-installed software. (And, they even had deals with their main competitors, Apple and IBM.) That was a much lower bar and easier for the government to make their case. In fact, the IE "tying" case was ultimately tossed out.
If anything, Google probably has more potential Antitrust issues in their relationship with Android handset makers than they do cross-promoting products on the web.
Tying as a legal issue has never made sense to me, and seems incompatible with private property and contract law. As a consumer, I don't have a right to an imaginary version of Windows without Internet Explorer that I wish Microsoft would build. Likewise, as a handset vendor, I don't have a right to an imaginary contract with Google where I get everything I want on my terms.
Tying laws, and antitrust broadly are a way for regulators to forcibly dictate what companies create. As stated above what's really revolting is this typically comes as a result of competitors lobbying to cripple the top player in the industry.
> It would be so very very easy to switch to Bing tomorrow (even easier than choosing not to use Facebook!) but people have chosen not to switch.
I assume that Bing also offers free e-mail with as many features, a calendar system, an equivalent of Google Reader, etc? Unless it can deliver all of that, it wouldn't be a very easy switch for me - whereas ditching Facebook is literally something I contemplate every time I access it and see the crap that's on my feed.
Microsoft has alternatives for mostly everything, including Google Apps if you're willing to switch to Exchange and pay the price for that.
But all these Google products are hard to switch from because they are kick-ass. It's hard for me to switch away, not because Google has me trapped, but because the competition sucks.
You can export all your data from Google and import it wherever you want. I did so with Google Reader (since you mentioned), but I came back to it since it's better than any desktop client I tried.
But this doesn't mean Google has lock-in, unless you extend the definition to include "being better than the competition" and that shouldn't trigger antitrust regulation; and if it did, you could say that the system is terribly broken.
The groups setup is a brilliant stab at Facebook's handling of privacy issues. I think they're going to make a push to gain ground from Facebook by saying they are taking security seriously from day 1 instead of waiting for something embarrassing to happen.
Business really seems to like Facebook. More and more I see
"check us out on our Facebook page". I want to see how Google addresses the display ad advantage Facebook presently has.
If people like a "business" page, they are actually opening a channel of communication directly to a customer that likes the company. If I were a business owner, I would like (no pun intended) to have such a channel with as many potential customers as I could get.
G+ person zero in my social circle bought their invite on ebay for $2 this AM. He put everyone else in a circle and started posting. All those in the circle had received invites from him by the end of the day.
Am I being unrealistically impatient, or is the only feature that actually matters the feature that lets your friends sign up? Google+ is a ghost town for me right now and there's nothing I can do to change that.
It's very frustrating. I love the ideas in Google+ and want to use it, but I've got no ability to share or add friends.
I had the opposite reaction: At first only a couple of close friends were in my circles, and it felt like a true social site. Even though many of us are miles and miles apart, we were sharing, talking, hanging out and posting. All this without hundreds of relatives, coworkers, ex girlfriends silently watching us like some stalkers from the bushes.
It got even better once i realized that because of the way circles work, this kind of feeling might actually be preserved without much effort on my behalf.
I'm actually very excited about this feature. I feel like George Costanza faced with "worlds colliding" when my family, friends, and coworkers were all meeting each other on my wall.
I had to give up the site because I have to keep those lives separate for my own sanity.
I was also excited about this feature (and the way it's properly exposed and integrated) until I started thinking about how sharing to a list can get complicated in deceptive ways very quickly. For example: when someone comments on something I shared, how does she know who will see that comment?
Yes, but that's still a significant amount of friction for something as important as understanding what your social context is. And how many people are really going to understand that that distinction even exists?
I think the real problem is that there's no easy mental model for the way information flows through the system. That's what metaphors are for. A "Circle" is not a metaphor. It's just a brand.
Sorry, I thought you were just asking is it possible to see the context. I wasn't looking to defend the product. That said, though...
I don't think Circles intends to aid in setting social context for other people. It's intended to help the sharer set context for who will see their content. Google is betting that people will share more information if they can limit it to the right groups of people.
As a commenter on this content, I don't get to reset the context or modify it. I can either trust the initial poster's choice or I can dig in further. The mental model is pretty simple: I trust the poster or I take a look around the room and see who else is there. I think when people do dig in further, they will either see a small group of people that they recognize or a large group of people which will set them in "public" context mode for commenting.
The people that don't notice are the same ones spamming their friends with FarmVille invites and there's limited controls for blocking them without disavowing them entirely within Facebook. They're the people that post drunk pics to Facebook in "Everyone" albums without any consideration.
So what if they use + the same way. Ignore them, move them to a quieter circle. And for their benefit, it defaults to a more protective privacy setting than Facebook, especially for pictures.
I definitely agree that Circles are better. I don't think they're as good as they could be. I don't think it's that clear for people, even those that are outside the group you cite, where exactly their comments are going. It's discoverable, but it's certainly not immediately obvious. I think privacy usability is really important, you want to make that stuff as easy and intuitive as possible.
Yeah, they really nailed it with Circles. That's exactly what I want out of a social network, and they've managed to implement it in a very intuitive way. I can't wait for my friends to get on it so I can finally delete my Facebook account.
Looks like they are adding people in rounds. This morning I added some friends to circles trying to find out how to get them in then later in the morning all of them were added. I did the same thing again and it had appeared to stop working. Late this afternoon all of the additional people were added.
Basically add everyone you want to circles and make a post. They'll likely get through the invite within a day or less based on my current experience.
Wave failed for this reason. It's a communication tool; if the people I want to communicate with can't use it right now, I'm moving on.
The invite-only, throttled approach worked for GMail because you could use it to talk to people who aren't on GMail. Facebook's gradual launch worked because entire social networks (universities) could join at once. Wave and Google+, however, were/are worthless in closed beta.
Interesting, I was definitely able to use a different account for my invite link. My original email was also tied to a Google Apps account with a custom domain. I can't seem to find the option to enable profiles in Google Apps, so I ended up registering with an old gmail account.
They aren't. I got an invite on my epochwolf gmail account but signed up with my personal gmail account. (Which I happened to be logged in to at the time)
So true. The red notification really hooks you back in.
It's because Google+'s social signal to noise ratio is so much higher than Facebook. I dread the red notifications in FB's upper left corner bc they're usually from some friend of friend's irrelevant spam event/survey/tagging etc. Google+ Circles really filters thats out.
Facebook's mistake was introducing Groups so late. With Circles, users can create Circles AS friends join. I will never retroactively organize my Facebook "friends" into Groups. I will, however, take a little time each day as new REAL friends come to Google+ to organize them to reflect real social structure.
You are actually kind of forced to think about it. If you want to 'follow' someone you can only do so by adding him to one or more of your circles. Of course, you can throw all people in the "Friends" circle, but I think given this visible choice not many will do that.
This is actually a misfeature -- it's hard enough to avoid procrastinating without having to summon the super-human willpower necessary to avoid clicking your notifications every time you do a simple search.
It's a misfeature if you are trying to actually get work done, but in my experience people aren't exactly going to use a different search engine so that they can avoid seeing something that they want to see. They are going to use the same one and complain "why do I have friends!" while reading their messages and procrastinating on their work.
I think you're spot on - Facebook is basically an entertainment destination. If google is trying to become the same thing, they may end up making the search experience worse.
I love Google+ so far, but I think this notification in all google sites is overkill. I'll be one of those looking for ways to disable that notification area.
Circles isn't really new. It's definitely implemented better (exposed and integrated), but it suffers from what I think is a serious weakness: hidden complexity. When you think about it as a broadcast, it's very simple and straightforward, but when someone in one of your Circles starts commenting/talking back, it gets a lot more complicated.
Appleseed has already addressed this. When you comment, a push notification is sent to the group defined the context. Actions are not broadcast, contexts are.
IE, Alice posts a blog, which is available to Group A. Bob posts a comment to the blog, and members of Group A are notified (even if they're not on Bob's friends list). Chris, who is on Bob's friends list, but not a member of Group A, will not receive a notification.
That's still potentially confusing, though. Bob has no idea who is part of Group A apart from himself. He could probably check, but there's a cognitive load/uncertainty there that equals friction to every secondary action (like a comment).
So there's two problems: 1. Bob might comment on Alice's post thinking he's in his own social context, which is reinforced by the fact that on Google+, he's in his own UI and Alice's post shows up in his Circle; 2. Bob has to consciously check to see what the context is every time he wants to make a comment on Alice's post.
My idea for a potential solution is "Places." Which is through the link I posted above.
It's the same in Google+, but you still have to consciously check. My point being that it's not really the functionality that matters per se, it's the metaphor. Having the explicit metaphor gives you an immediate understanding of how the information flows. Having an optional setting checked does not.
I agree. I love the idea of social searching, but when Facebook and Bing partnered up I was a little disappointed. I don't like Bing at all and have even made a conscious effort to force myself to like it, but just couldn't get in to it.
Shameless Plug: I just wrote a chrome extension that adds that little red notifications box to the browser, so the persistence of Google+ is unavoidable :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2716053
The black bar at the top of Google can be extremely distracting when I try to do work-related searches. I think their core product can suffer if they try to make this a game dashboard, bombarding users with these notifications.
The reason I think Google+ has a good shot at being successful boils down to the fact that its simply a better product. Not to disparage facebook and all the brilliant people working there, but the fact remains that it was first started by a few people out of a college dorm partly on a whim.
On the other hand, google+ has the might of one of the web's most powerful and innovative companies investing tons of R&D into the psychology and science of human friendships behind it. The fruits of all this research are plain to see in everything from the way it maintains circles to the implementation of hangouts. Ultimately, its just a better product. Not that it guarantees success, but it does a good chance at it.
I still think this is too little too late especially if Google+ is aimed at people under 30, most of that crowd is mobile and smartphones seem to be the way everyone in that group prefers to communicate not sitting at their desktop computers.
Maybe Baby Boomers will like it over Facebook or not at all for either, if it's aimed at a younger crowd I can't see it working unless as stated it's forced upon people.
With iPads and other tablets and mobile devices becoming more powerful with bigger and better screens I think a stripped down mobile social network app would be the best way to attract attention or a completely different concept.
It looks good and has some interesting features such as 'nearby view' similar to Facebook Places, the instant upload looks convenient and dangerous, is Huddle just Google Wave mobile light?
At least it looks like they are aware the mobile aspect is important.
Both the Android app and the mobile html version of Google+ look really good, so I'm not too sure this is too little too late from Google in that regard.
How about social search? Sparks has a huge potential, doesn't it? Facebook's greatest strength is its huge social graph. However, they still didn't create a really valuable social search.
Facebook can easily mimic google circles. But, who will be better at combining search and social to add some new value to both?
And hangouts? It could be quite hard for someone to make a good implementation, and still have a huge user base as google.
Anyway, circles seems like the easiest feature to implement for the likes of facebook. Good social search, and group video chat, this might be more difficult (facebooks classic chat isn't even working most of the time).
I wouldn't be surprised to see a really basic version of Office 365 integrated into Facebook as a response to this. There's already an experiment of sorts at http://docs.com
Duh. Click around Google after being in Google+. Your full account loads into the interface, it's very apparent that Google+ is the "next version of Google". I assume that eventually the "+" moniker will be dropped and it will simply be "Share with your Google Circle", etc. They say they're integrating it into their products... I think it's the other way around.
Look at how Gmail contacts are treated in Google+, they're relegated to a stopgap. Look at the privacy settings for various fields in your profile - they default to sharing with your Gmail Contacts and once you chose a circle, you never have any context of Gmail Contacts anymore.
I love unification and data aggregation, especially with Google's Data Liberation efforts and the export they already have for taking your social data (potentially elsewhere).
The context with Gmail is exactly what got them in trouble with Buzz. People think of e-mail as a very private tool, as opposed to a social network where things are not exactly private.
true, but with Buzz, everyone was added by default. it sort of sprung up out of nowhere, with everyone rushing to shut it down (myself included). with this, it seems that the privacy can be maintained (at least the feeling) with circles.
I'm pretty sure the opt-in for all Gmail users is what got them in trouble. I don't think anyone cares (despite it being awkward or weird) that the Buzz interface happens to live in Gmail. It's not like Buzz is at all related to your email. Besides, + is pretty darn privacy focused. Everything I type or enter in, even on the mobile apps, I have immediate control over its visibility.
Add to that the frustration that the thousands of facebook developers feel with the never ending changes and broken documentation. Btw, i believe Zynga is tied to facebook via some agreement. I d really like to know more about google's plans about its platform.
I 've just had an interesting discussion with a colleague who feels extremely annoyed when she sees the black social bar when she searches on google. She is now logging out of gmail when searching on google. I fear this may cause a major backlash over privacy, and it would be better for google to make it easy to turn off social features for search.
I especially like default use of groups and how it forces users to think about privacy from the get go. This is very different from my FB experience years ago and why I quit using FB.