It's fun to imagine a world in which Blogger was open sourced, with the core developers working for Google. Would WordPress have "won" in that alternate universe?
“The technology of the last 10 years should have all been open to experimentation by developers without locking users in. There are a lot of developers who believe in this. It's central to the mission of WhatsApp, btw, so if you doubted that it could be lucrative, you should think again.”
WhatsApp has changed and extended their XMPP basis such that it is not even remotely interoperable. They are actively battling third-party implementations. Their server is not federated. How exactly are "open", "experimentation" and "without locking users in" central to WhatsApp's mission?
I think they could have done Google+ and the whole social aspect better but they are still driving a couple of important buses. I think they should work on an open source WhatsApp clone with strong crypto.
- The browser it the platform of the future...they have a good browser
- Mobile is in everyone's pocket...they have a mobile OS
- Shocking newsflash...people still use mail...they have a good email service
- They provide "cloud office"
- Search is still search
And they have a bazillion other good projects.
If you want to say they slept on something I wouldn't even pick social. I'd say their biggest mistake in recent tmes was that they let Amazon get such a lead in cloud hosting/infrastructure and they aren't the #1 there.
The problem with Google and also open source apps is that they don't promote their products very well. It's more understandable with open source projects, though, since they don't have the funding, but Google has no excuse.
Take Hangouts for example. Android is now on over 1 billion devices, and will be on 3 billion in ~2 years. Most of those people should have Hangouts by default. But I'm willing to bet most of those people will not use Hangouts. Most of them won't even know what the heck Hangouts is. And since Google isn't promoting it heavily, that means that even if someone wants to use it, he knows it's going to be hard to get his friends to use it if they haven't even heard much about it or what it does.
Larry Page was right about needing to be "all-in" with a mobile company like Motorola. It used to be much worse while Eric Schimdt was leading it, with products like Google Checkout or even Google Docs being in a sort of coma-like state for years before you'd see any improvements. But even today, Google still seems to make a lot of stuff just for the sake of it, and don't seem all-in.
It feels like they want to just do the minimum amount of work for a product. With Hangouts they probably think "we've made it available to everyone with an Android phone - we don't need to do more than that now, do we? I should just become popular by itself!"
The difference between Hangouts and Whatsapp is that the company behind Whatapp treated it like a product - a product they needed to be as successful as possible to survive. Google treats Hangouts as a feature - a feature of which they don't necessarily think they need that bad to survive. That's why something like Whatsapp becomes popular, and something like Hangouts not so much.
That being said, I've love for them to integrate TextSecure/future Whisper (1) into Android, at the very least as an underlying layer, the way CyanogenMod did it recently (2). As soon as Whisper is out, I'm going to recommend everyone I know to use it, and same for e-mail as soon as a nice DarkMail-based client appears that's easy to use. But if Google offered me all of that, I wouldn't have to do it.
Google missed the boat because they only hired academics, not hackers.
They didn't need to embrace standards or build APIs, they just had to hire people who knew how to build products that real people outside the valley wanted. Google got lucky with its first product (search), acquired a company to make it a successful business (Adwords), and kept buying companies to try and onboard innovation.
Keep telling your self that. Hackers rarely build things that scale to the size Google needs. A failure for Google has 10 Million signups the first day.
The Product managers are what count in building a new product. Hackers are rarely good product managers.
Academics are only a problem when they don't get user feed back before hand. A good researcher can build product that fits the needs of the users, and when paired with good UI people you get a winning product. Google isn't good at getting user feed back they work like Mathematicians, not like Anthropologists and Psychologists.
Math and Anthropology are still academics. But not in the same field.
YouTube and Android only count as "trying" to onboard innovation? Seems like the strategy has been working not so terribly to me. This sounds rather like praise via faint damnation...
Im not sure google have any clue what people want.
The general impression I get is that they facilitate hundreds and hundreds of projects, let them develop, and if it looks good, let them loose into the wild and see what sticks. Most people only get to see the successful ones. I think the vast majority of these projects never see the wild.
In contrast, I get the impression that other big tech companies lean towards thinking something up, then trying to push on to users.
Perhaps I've just fallen for PR, but thats the impression I get.
Academics of all people should understand the value of having a wide open Internet tied together by search. I don't think that's where they went wrong. I think they let Facebook do their thinking for them, and Facebook has a fairly limited vision that's not at all friendly to the knowledge-building power of the web.
The premise that they missed the boat is wrong. They built a leaky boat because their core competence is in a different field. Google didn't "Miss the boat" they just never studied Nautical Science.
Google is very good at things that are mathematical, predictable, quantifiable, and numeric.
Google fails at things like Natural Language, Art, Social, Music, Video (youtube doesn't count that's just hosting and they bought it already successful, and it still doesn't hardly make any money)
Facebook would "miss the boat on search". Apple will "miss the boat" on social.
The difference is those guys won't go after a boat if they don't have the competency for it.
I was there at the time. It is not just that Google is good at certain things. It is also that the developers who built orkut were very very bright new developers (many just out of college) who lacked experience. The brazilians took over orkut and the developers were unable to make tough decisions; like starting fresh. They also made the friendster mistake; their first implementation couldn't scale and by the time the fixed it, it was too late. Furthermore, at the time, google had a policy of assigning managers to cover a very large number of developers and although the orkut manager was very sharp, he didn't have more than a few hours a week to provide leadership. The final issue, was that orkut had a huge usage rate and no other service (gmail, picasa, etc) would accept an integration with orkut because it meant having to handle the huge additional load. Google needed Larry to step in and tell people they had to make it work. This is a classic example of a failure of one of Google's core development philosophies: "Developers don't need management or experience; they can find the right solution using intelligence alone; you should never tell developers what to do." (full disclosure -- they kicked me out of the group so my opinion is biased; please take that into account).
So google failed to catch the social bus, who gives a fuck. Google is an engineering company at it's core, and as long as they continue to do ridiculously cool and useful R&D with their search advertising revenues in the hopes of developing new killer products. They are a far more impressive and valuable company than their derpy cousins at facebook who mostly just capitalize on people's vanity and boredom.
Well and google capitalizes on the fact that most normal people are too lazy to install adblockers and bored enough to watch youtube videos.
I admire their engineering capabilities but for me they are no longer cool and the 'one google' doctrine is something I actively try to resist (multiple accounts, log out, avoid services, use alternatives).
Wrong wrong wrong. OP, comments, parent, children, all wrong.
Tim Wu, Master Switch, monopoly over distribution channels - that is the answer. Either google ceases to exist or it becomes Ma Bell.
There's no third way, and all of the things that google does that seem confusing make perfect sense if you view them through the prism of trying to become The Phone Company.
Some things make sense, but surely not all; and surely not all as means to serve that goal. For example, storing all the world's videos makes sense while taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online does not.
Vic Gundotra ruined Google+, which could have and should have relegated Facebook to 2nd place, but then Real Names happened and the rest is history.
Google hires generalists: jacks of all trades, masters of none. Their web services and Android applications suffer greatly because of this ongoing idiocy. Don't believe me? Cool, go try building a house using only a Leatherman tool and get back to me. They need some sort of proven design czar to make dangerous choices and they need the specialized talent to execute on them.
Finally, when they went public, they were gradually coerced into being a profit-driven company over being a technology-driven company. Only Jeff Bezos seems to have figured out how to give Wall Street the middle finger so he can do as he pleases.
That said, their moonshots remain cool, and I'd get acquihired by them in a second given the kind of money they shell out.
What is unbelievable about this conversation is that the question about how content creators will get paid for the content is never raised. In fact this is biggest mistake. There are questions about how app developers get their exits but not how people who create content get paid. This is the heart of the problem with the internet today, not how someone can build the next bottleneck aggregator that rides on the wave of users creativity but pays them nothing in return. Social or not.
You are assuming they must be paid. But that's a questionable assumption. Content producer can have other means of living. Content creation could be a hobby, something you do because you have to, but not necessarily because you have to fill the fridge.
Just one example: China has most likely produced more poems than any other countries. Probably the same with paintings. And even more obvious with calligraphy. But, except for some few public writers, poetry or painting was never considered a professional activity. It was a skill, a way to spend time with friends, or alone, a way to cultivate oneself, a way to become fully human.
I think it was similar in ancient Greece and some parts of Europe in the Renaissance. Is it a coincidence that these periods are the most flourishing of human history?
Some might say that people of those times had leisure because they had slaves, or were aristocrats. That cannot be the difference: With all the machines we have now we could have as much leisure time. And I would trust much more a blogger writing for the sake of it than writing for money.
> Makes me wonder how Larry Page was convinced
> that Facebook was a threat.
Larry wasn't the only one. I don't think it was hard to see how Facebook posed (and still poses) a threat to Google:
Their site generates (a) more content behind a walled garden, and can produce (b) better demographic targeting for ad sales, which together pose a pretty serious threat to Google's core business (of selling targeted ads against public content). Couple this with exponential MAU growth and a very "sticky" property and you better get worried.
The comment you linked to is a bit ranty; IMO it confuses the execution flaws with G+ the product/business unit (of which there are many) with the overall decision to make a huge, concerted effort to compete head on in social.
Half-assed efforts like OpenSocial and Buzz were not going to get anywhere close to Facebook-style data and ads. (And I don't mean to disparage those teams; the half-assed part regards the company's priorities.) In hindsight maybe the walled garden of Facebook isn't such an existential threat to Google's business, but in 2010 it was still very hard to tell. Larry would have been negligent not to act.
Google's main source of revenue comes from ads that are driven by user want. I search for "car insurance" and Google gives me an ad for GEICO. But that doesn't really tell me anything about GEICO other than that they have enough money to pay for my click. They could be excellent or they could be crap, but they do likely sell car insurance and I'm looking for car insurance.
On Facebook, I may ask my friends "what car insurance do you have and how do you like it?" I get better information; I get testimonials from people whose judgement I trust (or at least I trust that their judgement isn't paid for, unlike Google's ad). This cuts into the heart and soul of Google's revenue - matching advertisers with user needs. Facebook hasn't done this to my knowledge, but let's say they classify those queries and responses. So, I post the question and my friend Julie replies, "I have GEICO and I love them". Six months later, our mutual friend Jeff sees an ad in the sidebar with a GEICO logo and that quote from Julie. Better yet, Jeff posts a picture of his new car and an advertisement comment appears using Julie's quote.
This isn't about car insurance. Your friends will not be as good about filling search requests as Google for many needs. However, your friends might be better for the ones that pay. I have no idea if this graph is accurate, but it can be interesting to go through: http://www.wordstream.com/articles/most-expensive-keywords. Attorney and Lawyer are the #4 and $6 most expensive keywords. I think I'd rather go with a friend's recommendation than a Google ad for something important like that. We've already covered insurance at #1.
That's what makes Facebook a threat. Rather than searching, people ask the hive-mind on Facebook for a recommendation for a restaurant, insurance company, lawyer, etc. Friends and friends-of-friends comment and like different answers and while people are certainly fallible, at the very least is comes off as more trustworthy. If you were looking for wireless service in a new city, would a Google ad be the first place you looked or maybe how your friends in that city fared. Recommendations would certainly be skewed by the fact that they have too little data to have a good opinion combined with popular perceptions of the carriers, but would ad space that went to the highest bidder be more trustworthy?
Now, when I search for the Battle of Gettysburg, I don't get ads. Same for when I search for Washington DC. Same for many other search requests - the type of requests that don't really have money in them; the type of requests I use Google for and would never really use Facebook for. The threat is that Google would become the place you go for the searches that don't pay while Facebook gets the requests for information that do pay.
Worse, what if Facebook leveraged itself for videos as it did for photos? As the comment you reference mentions, Facebook's photo platform was worse, but its social aspect made it better for the way users wanted to use photos. Facebook's messaging platform makes it good to chat to a group of people who you know, but not super well - and everyone can see the whole conversation even if they were added later. Businesses are already setting up pages and giving Facebook nicely formatted data about the business.
The worst part of it is that Facebook is good at what they do. They're not some company that can't handle the technological challenges. While one can call their business fluff, their engineering staff isn't. So, the company isn't going to go away via technical problems.
I'm not saying that any of this will come to pass, but Facebook is certainly a threat to Google's revenue. Google makes its money off of ads that can be replaced by friend recommendations. Again, I'm not saying the replacement will happen, but I can see the threat.
What boat did Google miss? Seems to me they're achieving their goals. They own search, they own video (YouTube), they have a very successful mobile OS, they have a successful desktop platform (Chrome OS and the Chrome browser), and they're innovating faster than anyone.
Yes but the problem is most of their revenues come from one thing - advertising. What their leadership is innovating desperately is to have something else people will give them money for. Successful companies have many things they make money on. You can be successful giving everything away for free when you are small and hope to IPO or get WhatsApped. When you are a real company you need lots of things that make money so that no single one of them failing will hurt you.
Anyone who thinks Google+ has missed the boat doesn't understand Google+.
Google+ brings together:
- SMS
- Chat
- Likes (+1), on apps, youtube, websites
- Videochat / screen-sharing / helping out
- The easiest OAuth implementation (Facebook needs an App-ID), google needs nothing
- Your location information (Android)
- GMail
- Contacts (backup of your cellphone)
- SEO (their platform is OPEN for the web, while Twitter and Facebook wants to hide their information)
- Information for businesses (Google Places)
- and probably a lot more that i didn't thought about right now.
- Pictures (backup of your android phone, default tag= personal)
- Documents (Google Drive)
Now, to create a social network, what do you need and what does Google + doesn't have? Google+ is probably one of the most used communication social network... But a lot of it is going on in the backend and you don't see it on the web.. Because people don't really use it right now (they don't use it by going to Google+ and enter their message there).
It's worth noting that when G+ launched (oddly missing from your list), it didn't have search.
Even now, while G+ has search (and yes, it's both fast and comprehensive in that everything is indexed), it's missing tools -- you cannot search by author, by date, or by content type (posts vs. contents). Search is balkanized: you can search ... "pages" from the search bar (along with posts and content which is what you likely want), but to search a Community you've first got to navigate to it, then realize that the thing that doesn't look like a search dialog is actually a search dialog.
There's no negation (you can't exclude people or terms), you can't search by user, you can't search by date ranges.
All that said: search was the one thing G+ really had going for it.
It interests me how people expects Google to do all the things they want. Let's be sure that Google is a business, not a missionary organization. They will guard their business interests first.
They did try to provide an open platform with Wave, which was amazing, powerful, innovative, open source and decentralized. And it failed. I wish it hadn't; I liked it a lot.
+1 totally agree. Wave was really good. I sometimes use Apache Wave, but not having the combined AppEngine support for Wave Robots makes Apache Wave less useful for my interests.
I strongly believe that was the right way to go. I never understood why Google didn't make a big push for standard structured information. They could have published standards for different industries similar to RSS. Everyone would have gotten on board similar to how every blog was pushing a RSS feed. Once the web moved towards structured data it would have been the first big step towards Semantic web.
Imagine writing apps that could do this: "Phone, please book top movie at the box office and dinner for Friday evening and adjust Nest at home accordingly".
First of all twitter's growth is slowing, so its not very apt to compare them to google. And the same thing may start happening to Facebook in a few years (as people are notoriously fickle with social media sites - which depend on mass adoption - not innovation). I think google is doing the right thing - they are sticking to what they know instead of trying to 'build around the web' and become another Microsoft (who tries to make 'their own version of everything' example - Silverlight).
[+] [-] troymc|12 years ago|reply
http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress/all/all
It's fun to imagine a world in which Blogger was open sourced, with the core developers working for Google. Would WordPress have "won" in that alternate universe?
[+] [-] kcbanner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ralphm|12 years ago|reply
WhatsApp has changed and extended their XMPP basis such that it is not even remotely interoperable. They are actively battling third-party implementations. Their server is not federated. How exactly are "open", "experimentation" and "without locking users in" central to WhatsApp's mission?
[+] [-] meowface|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kriro|12 years ago|reply
- The browser it the platform of the future...they have a good browser
- Mobile is in everyone's pocket...they have a mobile OS
- Shocking newsflash...people still use mail...they have a good email service
- They provide "cloud office"
- Search is still search
And they have a bazillion other good projects.
If you want to say they slept on something I wouldn't even pick social. I'd say their biggest mistake in recent tmes was that they let Amazon get such a lead in cloud hosting/infrastructure and they aren't the #1 there.
[+] [-] higherpurpose|12 years ago|reply
Take Hangouts for example. Android is now on over 1 billion devices, and will be on 3 billion in ~2 years. Most of those people should have Hangouts by default. But I'm willing to bet most of those people will not use Hangouts. Most of them won't even know what the heck Hangouts is. And since Google isn't promoting it heavily, that means that even if someone wants to use it, he knows it's going to be hard to get his friends to use it if they haven't even heard much about it or what it does.
Larry Page was right about needing to be "all-in" with a mobile company like Motorola. It used to be much worse while Eric Schimdt was leading it, with products like Google Checkout or even Google Docs being in a sort of coma-like state for years before you'd see any improvements. But even today, Google still seems to make a lot of stuff just for the sake of it, and don't seem all-in.
It feels like they want to just do the minimum amount of work for a product. With Hangouts they probably think "we've made it available to everyone with an Android phone - we don't need to do more than that now, do we? I should just become popular by itself!"
The difference between Hangouts and Whatsapp is that the company behind Whatapp treated it like a product - a product they needed to be as successful as possible to survive. Google treats Hangouts as a feature - a feature of which they don't necessarily think they need that bad to survive. That's why something like Whatsapp becomes popular, and something like Hangouts not so much.
That being said, I've love for them to integrate TextSecure/future Whisper (1) into Android, at the very least as an underlying layer, the way CyanogenMod did it recently (2). As soon as Whisper is out, I'm going to recommend everyone I know to use it, and same for e-mail as soon as a nice DarkMail-based client appears that's easy to use. But if Google offered me all of that, I wouldn't have to do it.
1- https://whispersystems.org/blog/a-whisper/
2- http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/whisperpush-secure-messaging...
[+] [-] dsl|12 years ago|reply
They didn't need to embrace standards or build APIs, they just had to hire people who knew how to build products that real people outside the valley wanted. Google got lucky with its first product (search), acquired a company to make it a successful business (Adwords), and kept buying companies to try and onboard innovation.
[+] [-] drakaal|12 years ago|reply
The Product managers are what count in building a new product. Hackers are rarely good product managers.
Academics are only a problem when they don't get user feed back before hand. A good researcher can build product that fits the needs of the users, and when paired with good UI people you get a winning product. Google isn't good at getting user feed back they work like Mathematicians, not like Anthropologists and Psychologists.
Math and Anthropology are still academics. But not in the same field.
[+] [-] ajross|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alan_cx|12 years ago|reply
The general impression I get is that they facilitate hundreds and hundreds of projects, let them develop, and if it looks good, let them loose into the wild and see what sticks. Most people only get to see the successful ones. I think the vast majority of these projects never see the wild.
In contrast, I get the impression that other big tech companies lean towards thinking something up, then trying to push on to users.
Perhaps I've just fallen for PR, but thats the impression I get.
[+] [-] davewiner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] drakaal|12 years ago|reply
Google is very good at things that are mathematical, predictable, quantifiable, and numeric.
Google fails at things like Natural Language, Art, Social, Music, Video (youtube doesn't count that's just hosting and they bought it already successful, and it still doesn't hardly make any money)
Facebook would "miss the boat on search". Apple will "miss the boat" on social.
The difference is those guys won't go after a boat if they don't have the competency for it.
[+] [-] swframe|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soup10|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chappi42|12 years ago|reply
I admire their engineering capabilities but for me they are no longer cool and the 'one google' doctrine is something I actively try to resist (multiple accounts, log out, avoid services, use alternatives).
[+] [-] m3mnoch|12 years ago|reply
first, look at this chart: http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/services/ranking-factors-201...
second, notice how all of the highest ranking seo factors are social.
third, google makes more money on search ads because it monetizes intent. you know what else monetizes well? recommendations.
fourth, owning both the recommendation data AND the ad data enables even better (aka more expensive) ad targeting.
[+] [-] mirsadm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergiosgc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsync|12 years ago|reply
Tim Wu, Master Switch, monopoly over distribution channels - that is the answer. Either google ceases to exist or it becomes Ma Bell.
There's no third way, and all of the things that google does that seem confusing make perfect sense if you view them through the prism of trying to become The Phone Company.
[+] [-] jmspring|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ronilan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meowface|12 years ago|reply
The link, for anyone who hasn't read it: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX
[+] [-] gregw134|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varelse|12 years ago|reply
Google hires generalists: jacks of all trades, masters of none. Their web services and Android applications suffer greatly because of this ongoing idiocy. Don't believe me? Cool, go try building a house using only a Leatherman tool and get back to me. They need some sort of proven design czar to make dangerous choices and they need the specialized talent to execute on them.
Finally, when they went public, they were gradually coerced into being a profit-driven company over being a technology-driven company. Only Jeff Bezos seems to have figured out how to give Wall Street the middle finger so he can do as he pleases.
That said, their moonshots remain cool, and I'd get acquihired by them in a second given the kind of money they shell out.
[+] [-] wdr1|12 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Norvig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Abelson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Bloch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harald_Tveit_Alvestrand
[+] [-] pointillistic|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbog|12 years ago|reply
You are assuming they must be paid. But that's a questionable assumption. Content producer can have other means of living. Content creation could be a hobby, something you do because you have to, but not necessarily because you have to fill the fridge.
Just one example: China has most likely produced more poems than any other countries. Probably the same with paintings. And even more obvious with calligraphy. But, except for some few public writers, poetry or painting was never considered a professional activity. It was a skill, a way to spend time with friends, or alone, a way to cultivate oneself, a way to become fully human.
I think it was similar in ancient Greece and some parts of Europe in the Renaissance. Is it a coincidence that these periods are the most flourishing of human history?
Some might say that people of those times had leisure because they had slaves, or were aristocrats. That cannot be the difference: With all the machines we have now we could have as much leisure time. And I would trust much more a blogger writing for the sake of it than writing for money.
[+] [-] willholloway|12 years ago|reply
Hack on that.
[+] [-] Sven7|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuhong|12 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6754053
Makes me wonder how Larry Page was convinced that Facebook was a threat.
[+] [-] mik3y|12 years ago|reply
Their site generates (a) more content behind a walled garden, and can produce (b) better demographic targeting for ad sales, which together pose a pretty serious threat to Google's core business (of selling targeted ads against public content). Couple this with exponential MAU growth and a very "sticky" property and you better get worried.
The comment you linked to is a bit ranty; IMO it confuses the execution flaws with G+ the product/business unit (of which there are many) with the overall decision to make a huge, concerted effort to compete head on in social.
Half-assed efforts like OpenSocial and Buzz were not going to get anywhere close to Facebook-style data and ads. (And I don't mean to disparage those teams; the half-assed part regards the company's priorities.) In hindsight maybe the walled garden of Facebook isn't such an existential threat to Google's business, but in 2010 it was still very hard to tell. Larry would have been negligent not to act.
[+] [-] mdasen|12 years ago|reply
Google's main source of revenue comes from ads that are driven by user want. I search for "car insurance" and Google gives me an ad for GEICO. But that doesn't really tell me anything about GEICO other than that they have enough money to pay for my click. They could be excellent or they could be crap, but they do likely sell car insurance and I'm looking for car insurance.
On Facebook, I may ask my friends "what car insurance do you have and how do you like it?" I get better information; I get testimonials from people whose judgement I trust (or at least I trust that their judgement isn't paid for, unlike Google's ad). This cuts into the heart and soul of Google's revenue - matching advertisers with user needs. Facebook hasn't done this to my knowledge, but let's say they classify those queries and responses. So, I post the question and my friend Julie replies, "I have GEICO and I love them". Six months later, our mutual friend Jeff sees an ad in the sidebar with a GEICO logo and that quote from Julie. Better yet, Jeff posts a picture of his new car and an advertisement comment appears using Julie's quote.
This isn't about car insurance. Your friends will not be as good about filling search requests as Google for many needs. However, your friends might be better for the ones that pay. I have no idea if this graph is accurate, but it can be interesting to go through: http://www.wordstream.com/articles/most-expensive-keywords. Attorney and Lawyer are the #4 and $6 most expensive keywords. I think I'd rather go with a friend's recommendation than a Google ad for something important like that. We've already covered insurance at #1.
That's what makes Facebook a threat. Rather than searching, people ask the hive-mind on Facebook for a recommendation for a restaurant, insurance company, lawyer, etc. Friends and friends-of-friends comment and like different answers and while people are certainly fallible, at the very least is comes off as more trustworthy. If you were looking for wireless service in a new city, would a Google ad be the first place you looked or maybe how your friends in that city fared. Recommendations would certainly be skewed by the fact that they have too little data to have a good opinion combined with popular perceptions of the carriers, but would ad space that went to the highest bidder be more trustworthy?
Now, when I search for the Battle of Gettysburg, I don't get ads. Same for when I search for Washington DC. Same for many other search requests - the type of requests that don't really have money in them; the type of requests I use Google for and would never really use Facebook for. The threat is that Google would become the place you go for the searches that don't pay while Facebook gets the requests for information that do pay.
Worse, what if Facebook leveraged itself for videos as it did for photos? As the comment you reference mentions, Facebook's photo platform was worse, but its social aspect made it better for the way users wanted to use photos. Facebook's messaging platform makes it good to chat to a group of people who you know, but not super well - and everyone can see the whole conversation even if they were added later. Businesses are already setting up pages and giving Facebook nicely formatted data about the business.
The worst part of it is that Facebook is good at what they do. They're not some company that can't handle the technological challenges. While one can call their business fluff, their engineering staff isn't. So, the company isn't going to go away via technical problems.
I'm not saying that any of this will come to pass, but Facebook is certainly a threat to Google's revenue. Google makes its money off of ads that can be replaced by friend recommendations. Again, I'm not saying the replacement will happen, but I can see the threat.
[+] [-] Mikeb85|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nissehulth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NicoJuicy|12 years ago|reply
Google+ brings together: - SMS - Chat - Likes (+1), on apps, youtube, websites - Videochat / screen-sharing / helping out - The easiest OAuth implementation (Facebook needs an App-ID), google needs nothing - Your location information (Android) - GMail - Contacts (backup of your cellphone) - SEO (their platform is OPEN for the web, while Twitter and Facebook wants to hide their information) - Information for businesses (Google Places) - and probably a lot more that i didn't thought about right now. - Pictures (backup of your android phone, default tag= personal) - Documents (Google Drive)
Now, to create a social network, what do you need and what does Google + doesn't have? Google+ is probably one of the most used communication social network... But a lot of it is going on in the backend and you don't see it on the web.. Because people don't really use it right now (they don't use it by going to Google+ and enter their message there).
[+] [-] ulfw|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toyg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] B-Con|12 years ago|reply
Yeah, if only every product they offered either:
a) had comprehensive search capabilities (YouTube, GMail, map, etc)
b) was at least decent integrated with their flagship search (News, YouTube, images, Blogger, heck, Android, etc)
c) was a variant of their flagship search (images, news, sound, etc)
I think it's fair to say that Drive/Docs/Keep and Calendar are fairly independent of Search. Tsk, tsk, for shame.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|12 years ago|reply
Even now, while G+ has search (and yes, it's both fast and comprehensive in that everything is indexed), it's missing tools -- you cannot search by author, by date, or by content type (posts vs. contents). Search is balkanized: you can search ... "pages" from the search bar (along with posts and content which is what you likely want), but to search a Community you've first got to navigate to it, then realize that the thing that doesn't look like a search dialog is actually a search dialog.
There's no negation (you can't exclude people or terms), you can't search by user, you can't search by date ranges.
All that said: search was the one thing G+ really had going for it.
[+] [-] sidcool|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcv|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] judk|12 years ago|reply
It isn't clear to me why no startup has built a product on the Wave code or concept.
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WWKong|12 years ago|reply
Imagine writing apps that could do this: "Phone, please book top movie at the box office and dinner for Friday evening and adjust Nest at home accordingly".
[+] [-] whitef0x|12 years ago|reply