the consumer?? Google’s Facebook Competitor, The Google+ Social Network, Finally Arrives Google’s long expected second shot at taking on Facebook in the social networking space has arrived in the form of the Google+ Project. It has some interesting twists on the social networking model but is far from a Facebook-killer. That Name The terrible name is a bad start. Google+? Google+! I can’t even question or exclaim about the bad name without it looking bad in writing. Pronounced “Google Plus,” the product is officially written as Google+ — making placing any punctuation after the name fairly awkward. Seriously, I’m cursing whoever made the final decision to go with Google+ as a name. Wasn’t the Google +1 sharing service bad enough? Now we have Google+, which in turn allows you to +1 things that you’ve Google+’d. My head hurts from writing that. In this article, I’ll generally stick with the Google+ name except where Google Plus is more legible, due to punctuation. The Google+ Project What about the product itself? Google dubs Google+ as a “project” rather than a product, stressing it’s part of making Google itself more social rather than being a standalone social network to take on Facebook. “It’s ‘Plus’ because it takes products from Google and makes them better and ‘project’ because it’s an ongoing set of products,” said Vic Gundotra, the senior vice president who oversees Google’s social products. But is it Facebook competitor, I asked in a follow-up question. Google emailed back: No. We realize that today people are increasingly connecting with one another on the web. But the ways in which we connect online are limited and don’t mimic our real-life relationships. The Google+ project is our attempt to make online sharing even better. We aren’t trying to replace what’s currently available, we just want to introduce a new way to connect online with the people that matter to you. OK, but as the saying goes, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. And Google+ looks like and quacks like Facebook in several ways. http://searchengineland.com/googles-facebook-competitor-the-google-social-network-finally-arrives-83401
Google wins clearly. Video technology & maps etc. Can I short Facebook already?
For me to switch, i’d need to have my entire friendlist exported with minimal effort. No way I’m going to try and do that all over again. Now speaking to FB’s mammoth valuation given a couple months ago or so. myspace is expected to be sold for $20mm… murdoch sunk over half a bil for it.
The winner = Jo-Wilfried Tsonga He could have taken down Chuck Norris this morning, too.
I like google products. Given their history, quite sure they would do a good job with this. I am most likely going to shift away from FB. Have you guys got an invite to google+? Nothing wrong with the FB experience, except that I don’t think tracking user’s social interactions alone should imply a multibillion dollar valuation. Anyway, always believed that google knows more about a person than FB, and this was even before Google+. Would be fun watching the guys who bought FB at those absurd valuations. Unless they manage to find a greater fool. BTW, have you guys tried DuckDuckGo - kinda like it.
There would have to be an overwhelming reason for me to switch. Also, consider this. FB does a good job of keeping privacy how you want it and maintaining structure. It also has the advantage of familiarity. But it’s biggest advantage by far is THE BUILT UP PHOTO LIBRARY. I’m not a big photo person myself, I think there are fewer picture of me than Sasquatch. But for most of the heaviest users, particularly the female demographic, we are talking THOUSANDS of photos per user in innumerable albums that would have to be transferred. People can be touchy about their photo albums. So you say, bid deal, google can find a way to transfer them. Maybe. But I think it would be pretty damn difficult to find a way to transfer the HUGE number of photos that aren’t your uploads but in which you’re tagged. Detecting and transferring that properly would be in my mind impossible. Particularly in cases where all parties are not dual users, etc. Photos are pretty much the key cornerstone of the facebook experience, the whole idea is built around it (an online photo year book). I say facebook maintains its market. It would be easier for facebook to integrate or mimic google applications than for google to steal the user base.
You only need critical mass, momentum and then bang! the tipping point. I think a lot of people think FB is for the socially inept / great unwashed, that the guy who launched it got lucky and it has had its 15 minutes.
FB may stay for the stickiness factor or the photo library reason, Just that i never thought it to be worth the 50/100b. And now even more so. BTW I have been exploring my plus one account now, and am mostly happy.
I don’t know I am just glad that something like this can tell facebook ‘investors’ that 100bil is something crazy. Especially for something that is a social trend and we know those trends most of the time change sooner than we think
I think Google+ is built on FB’s weaknesses. Awesome product, definitely gonna switch and be more active.
I suppose if you wanted to short Facebook, you would need to short whoever owns the private equity stakes.
Google FTW BS has some good points though - biggest drawback is definitely the photos. Who wants to look at all their old pictures after a few years though? Not me?
I personally think Google will crush Facebook like a red headed stepchild.
Google has the money, the infrastrucuture, and the brain power to beat facebook in the long run. I suspect that Facebook will catch up in a big way in this regard as they are acutely aware of their weakness. Facebook will team up with someone, probably microsoft, and their shareholders will do just find in the end. This is already the case with skype. A lot of people expect that Apple will be the one, but I think they underestimate how big of control freaks Apple are. I accidentally turned on Aol Instant Messenger yesteday. I hadn’t used it in perhaps four years. Skype and facebook really killed it for me. Everyone I currently wanted to talked to I spoke to on skype. Everyone else were people I just wanted to forget. What was funny is that I only had 3 people who were still online when I turned on AOL. The last time i used it, there might have been 50 or so. The ones that were still online were computer nerds that use things like trillian to connect them to everything all at once so weren’t really actively using it. The one who might have been using it was a girl I used to drive to school in highschool. She always had her g-string hanging out every morning. I always loved watching her get out of the car. In any case I found this article interesting. Google + is a social reboot - I agree! http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/social.media/07/12/google.plus.reboot/
My issue with Google is that they already have a market cap of 170B. How much higher can they go?
I think Googles peak could look something like this 10 years from now theoretically: Say 80 percent of the world uses their operating systems to run their 2020’s version of smartphone/tablets/cloud devices. Businesses no longer use microsoft We use them for navigating, Hell, we even use them to drive our cars for us. Net Neutrality goes dead. They effectively own the internet. All of this will be integrated into one seemless system so that you won’t even really need to think that you’re using google. At some point, in walks the government and breaks up the monopoly. Until then I think google will continue to go up and up and up.
So estimate their market cap 10 years from now. 500B, 1T?
I wouldn’t be very good at guessing market cap. What I do know is that I seem to be using more and more google products every day even though other substitutes exist. This is becuase they integrate nicely. I’m a mac user since the original imac so I’ve seen how one brand can dominate the consumer. You’ll use their products just because everything else you use Integrates perfectly with it. This is why Microsoft still exists. Google has the opportunity to do this across virtually every aspect of our life. Anything driven by information and technology is in their crosshairs and they have all the brightest people working for them. They don’t just sell toys like apple; Google has already taken the internet from a disorganized mess to something legible, orderly and functional. They are doing that everywhere else. I’m not sure how to quantify that in value terms but it is worth a lot. I think we are only just beginning to see where this technology will take us.
Just on the point of Google owning the net: Google is coming with a new protocol called SPDY to replace HTTP. It supposed to be faster than HTTP. If successful, Google will control the delivery (SPDY) and consumption (Chrome) of websites. Also if this is how most users access the web, FB will have to play ball with GOOG. They have indeed come a long way than just indexing the web!
That’s a good example CFA_Bombay. Remember how you used to have all your favorite friends, relatives, even pizza places phone numbers memorized back in the day? Now you don’t know any phone numbers because they are all stored on your phone, which syncs to your contacts on your laptop etc. I contend that Google already owns the web. What do you do on the web without Google? How many IP addresses do you have memorized? Everything you do starts and ends with google. Pretty soon they will have their own sick operating system and cloud systems so that you won’t even need anything else. You won’t even need your own laptop, you can just log onto your google account from any computer running google’s operating system and all your stuff will be right there. Right now there are several companies trying to do this: Apple is one of them. Only a few will be successful but more likely than not their will be one big winner and in my mind it will probably be google. Ten years from now I won’t care who makes my laptop or my smartphone, I will care about which system I’m using.