Comment by dasil003
10 years ago
Everyone you know thought Google+ was a better interface than Facebook? That seems quite a strong anecdotal statement, but I have a hard time accepting it at face value. Yes G+ had some nice aesthetics, mechanics, use of white space, etc, but conceptually and organizationally it was a mess.
To chalk it all up to network effects is to let them off the hook too easily, after all there is no reason you can't build other successful social networks concurrently with Facebook, you have your Twitters, Instagrams, Snapchats, etc.
The way I see G+ failing is because there was no soul or vision to the product, it was driven by a simple fear of Facebook, and it's implementation was a simple conglomeration of features that constituted a cool tech demo but was not shaped by real users or a real use case (Google does this often, see Wave, but at least in that case they were trying something novel). In short, G+ was not true to Google's DNA.
I think my view still supports your main point though—stacks simply are not the same for each company. Lower level stacks tend to be more similar, but at the top they are serving unique market segments, so they are simply not fungible.
> but conceptually and organizationally it was a mess.
Conceptually they had the core of a very good story, which was the idea I could have "Facebook where I segregated the people in my lives". It was even quite good timing, as it was mooted around the time people were starting to bubble up stories about "my boss started reading my Facebook and I got fired", "my family are upset by the politics my friends discuss" and so on.
The biggest problems with G+ from my perspective, around launch time, was other than Facebook's network effect, that the dribbling out of invites completely cut against the core success model for a social network, and the whole circles functionality ended up being one of those UI nightmares you get from Googlers who don't understand how normal humans actually work.
It may have been a nice story as viewed by some of us privacy-conscious people (I remember rooting really hard for it, and a couple of my most shy family members still use it), but it wasn't a viable strategy when trying to steal significant (>10%) market share from an incumbent, especially when the target audience was the general public.
G+ positioned itself against Facebook sort of like DuckDuckGo went against Google: we made the same product, but fixed X!!!, where X is some gripe about the incumbent's product that only a small percentage of the product's potential userbase cares about (privacy, in both of these cases).
That was (and is!) a fantastic strategy for DDG, for whom a fraction of a percent of all search traffic counts as massive, life-changing success. Google is not DDG, though. G+ would have needed a much larger share of the social networking market to be considered a win for Google, and the initial differentiation was not anywhere near clear enough to get there against a rival as strong as Facebook.
I also agree about the UI mess, and all that, of course, it was not a great product to use out of the gate.
> but conceptually and organizationally it was a mess.
Facebook annoyed many users each time a new update came. The privacy settings were constantly being reset. I do not believe facebook has a great UI to this day. Google+ is not great but it does not offend me the same way.
A product doesn't win in the market by not being offensive in some way, but by providing something people want. Google+ didn't commit many of the sins of Facebook, but it also didn't have a compelling use case other than "I hate facebook"
And I say that as someone that doesn't have Facebook account.
A tangent.
> The privacy settings were constantly being reset.
True. What privacy-minded Facebook critics often miss is that privacy settings seem to have been constantly reset towards "more private" mode. Hell, at this point Facebook is starting to get really annoying with those recurring reminders about visibility of my post. I post all-public because I like it that way, I hate the constant nagging about switching to more private mode.
Before a few years ago they were being reset to less private.
Yeah, head starts can be overcome. Especially with each generation. I thought MySpace was horrible but also unbeatable because of its reach.