Google's coherent bouquet
dcurt.is
dcurt.is
I disagree with this frame and this his implicit answer.
Facebook's advertising model is sort of inherently adversarial. Their ads have to distract you to be successful. That means there's always a tension between user experience of the product and the revenue stream.
Google's meaningful innovation was capturing your intent, so that it can give you relevant ads when you're actually looking something, often to buy. All the social stuff is in service of making that relevance part better, but it's an inherently more constructive model of advertising.
I think it also works a lot better, and is much harder to replicate than Facebook's.
You need both intent and relevance. Intent comes from search, relevance comes from you and your social graph.
Personally, I would have preferred Google to have gone in a different direction, pushing more open protocols and standards, letting the Web bloom entire rain forests and sorting through those jungles for the rest of us. Creating yet another silo seems like "now you have three problems".
But I don't really see how Facebook's any better off.
I sort of see now that you were just responding to Page's sentiments, it seemed a bit one-sided.
Would be interesting to know on what scale they are already capturing this type of intent & relevance search traffic. I'm guessing from the fact they integrated web search back in 2008, and it's not been made more prominent since, not a huge amount.
Okay, so I keep trying to wrap my head around this, but I just genuinely don't get this idea.
Facebook is huge, at the moment, but it has one public facing product. What does that product let you do? Be social, within its confines, and connect to everyone you ever knew, sharing links, photos and text snippets. Yeah, there's a lot of end-user value in that and, for as long as they can ride the power-law effects, Facebook will be an ad-revenue generating monster.
Google, on the other hand, has a suite of tools that lets people do almost everything else in the online world. Search is moving ever so slowly into the 3D/"real-world" through maps and product searches and now the goggles project (if it stands the test of time, of course).
In short, google helps its users manage their worlds whereas Facebook manages people in the Facebook world. Without significant expansion and diversification, Facebook has a much more precarious position, at least as far as producing end-user value goes.
Thus far, that innovation and expansion has been what? Facebook connect? Putting "like" buttons all over the web and tracking my every move? That's not value for the average Facebook user (for advertisers? sure, very much). So, what else? Letting me share all of my activities like what music I'm listening to, etc? All of that happens within the facebook walled garden – and that tactic makes the whole thing a bet the house gamble. As long as people stay with FB, it works, but once they drift away, it all falls apart just as quickly as it grew. (The power law can cut both ways)
I don't deny Facebook has a lot of value, but I just think that the more open framework/platform presented by Google is going to play out much more strongly in the long-run...
Google still makes bulk of its money from advertising. As you admit yourself, facebook has precious data for advertisers that Google doesn't. Facebook is pretty directly competing with google already and getting ad dollars that would have otherwise gone to Google. This is not easily noticeable right now because advertising is still growing pretty rapidly so everyone(including google) can show growth but over time, it will begin to show that Google has lost a specific type of ad market.
As long as people stay with FB...
So I have been on facebook since 2005. For over 5 years now, I have heard the argument that facebook is going to be another friendster and then myspace. I think it is time to put this argument to rest. Sure, facebook will die some day but I don't think its death is imminent.
The problem is humans are social creatures. So if all there is is Google, humans will do stuff on the internet and Google will know about it, but the social aspects of life remain offline and therefore inaccessible to advertisers. Facebook has managed to get people to spend a much larger percentage of their time online by moving part of their social lives there and they're gambling that a significant portion of that time people will do things that advertisers will be interested to know about.
Personally, I doubt this gamble will have the payoff they're apparently expecting. The primary focus during social interaction seems to be on, well, social interaction. Consumption only plays a very small role (though I'm sure Bacardi would like to pop up ads while you're chatting with your buddies on Facebook). Facebook basically catches people only when they're in the mood for fun and relaxation, whereas Google captures people right when they're in the mood for consumption and for spending money and to an advertiser that is much, much more valuable.
1) Identity. Moving each product from having a silo'ed identity profile to having a centralized social profile.
2) Contacts. Many many products need to know not just who you are, but who you will be collaborating with. From sharing, to basic ACL settings on documents. For the consumer side, Social contacts replaces the previous layer that was used: Corporate LDAP servers or Mail servers (Notes/Exchange/ACAP/etc)
3) Sharing. Pretty much every app features some form of collaboration, even if it just means sending a link to someone.
4) Activity Log. Moreover, it is useful for many apps to keep a history of recent actions you've taken, either for the purpose of rolling them back, or for allowing you to search and find knowledge, either about what you did, or what a collaborator did.
dcurtis is basically repeating Zuckerberg's claim that social is something you can't add later, and I think this is hogwash. Sure, you certainly have to re-design the API. But that doesn't mean you have to invent a whole new product.
YouTube for example, doesn't have to throw away their entire product and start from scratch vs a product that may have been built from scratch for sharing videos on a social network.
I believe far far too much credit is being given to all kinds of hand wavy arguments about designing for social, or 'social dna', and not enough given to simple market timing, niche targeting, and network effects with respect to Facebook.
At this point, Facebook could produce really terrible product addons, they'd still continue to gain users. And competitors really can't differentiate themselves enough to siphon off users, because the marginal gain in utility isn't worth the switching costs.
Social networking, if it is as important as everyone says, is a commodity. Facebook's wall-garden has a substantial network effect of making it costly to choose other networks. If Facebook had been invented as a federated, distributed, open social network in the beginning, then, and only then, could you make all kinds of arguments about their user base being related to mythical 'social dna' or superior design ethos.
It's like looking at Microsoft Windows user base in the 90s, and saying it indicates that Apple "doesn't have desktop DNA" design chops, because clearly, all those users use Windows purely based on design decisions Microsoft made.
Either dcurtis@ isn't an engineer, or he's a much, much better engineer than the rest of us. : )
Google owns your identity in that they know what you want when no one else is watching.
Which do you think is actually more valuable? (Honest question - I have no idea).
I'm not sure it's nearly as clean cut as Dustin makes it seem, and the disclosure at the end is pretty relevant...money talks.
It seems to me, the existing problems they have with the upgraded products are simply usability design problems. Something that could be fixed by just moving the right elements to the right places. Or, more importantly, adding links to the right "methods" of the right products at the right places in other existing products. I do think they've been making terrible design decisions lately, but that seems like something that can be fixed by just... getting better designers and listening to feedback.
Why exactly is that some people think otherwise?
Google isn't a social network, and the products they offer us as users will be stronger if they don't pretend to be. But they've built their business on selling insights into our preferences, and Facebook has shown that a social network is the richest way to gather the data needed for that model.
I'd find it more hopeful if Page showed any signs of understanding that Facebook isn't about the social graph, but rather about communications. Google should be using Gmail as a fulcrum, rather than Google+.
Even if you buy that facebook is an existential threat to Google, Google shouldn't be destroying itself even faster.
If I were Google, I'd focus on areas where Google's products are already strong, and expand those, vs. trying to force everything into a social box. I don't think social is the ultimate end of all products -- a 10% social effort (in targeted ways) combined with doubling down on Google's strengths, and hitting Mobile out of the park, would result in a much stronger Google than...Google+ and a castrated gmail.
The problem with this piece is that a lot of those products the parent is referring to were discontinued by GOOG: "more wood behind fewer arrows", etc.
I think the notion of the bouquet is quite apt; the huge number of disparate google products are not something that can be made social with a simple update. In order to be so, they have to be completely re-imagined. Google+ as a social network was a good start (with circles and hangouts) but still was trying to shoehorn the social experience into the same google experience context.
What is the damage to Google if, say, Reader or Blogger is never merged into Google+? They're useful standalone products and successful in their own niche, and they won't stop being so. Facebook doesn't have them, so clearly they're not "required to compete with facebook", which seems to be the core assumption.
Obvoiusly Google (like most tech companies) faces constant pressure from industry change, and IMHO they've stumbled over the past two years or so (which amounts basically to having to settle for "credible second place" with Android and G+ instead of the huge success they achieved with search, ads or gmail). But really: this article is just more piling on.
There is nothing wrong with a bunch of separate products; the problem is that unifying them under a social umbrella involves more than doing + social.
Basically it's circular: Google can't be social because unifying to be social is too hard because social requires complicated unification. Where's the demonstration that "being social" requires "complicated unification". What if they cherry picked the 8-10 things that make sense for social (e.g. Docs/Drive are obvious candidates, Reader/Blogger not so much).
Like I said, it just seems like a weak argument that happens to look strong only because it aligns well with the current "Google is dying" zeitgeist.
As for the unifying, that is indeed google's goal at this time. Do they have to unify them all? No. Are they trying to unify many with social features of dubious utility? Yes.
My issue is simply that they should go back to the drawing board instead of adding features to existing products. They can break free of the current paradigm and really make some wild new stuff. Plenty will fail, but some key ones will succeed.
This is google after all, one of the largest concentrations of brilliant people in the world - I do believe they can do it.
There are certain services I can't log into with a certain accounts, others that automatically log me out and others that I am totally confused about what is even happening.
It's not an easy task and it seems that they are trying to fix it with recent changes but it's still a total mess.
shameless plug
In particular, I find Google+'s non-write access api to be my major stumbling block to using it, socially that is. I want to push twitter/fb to it. I want openness and I think it would help their adoption. That would be a bouquet I'd want to smell and I know many others as well.
I think Facebook has hit its high water mark. I have little doubt Google will invent something unexpected and useful.
Seriously, what's going to hurt you more: having your Facebook profile suddenly shut down or your Google account?
Google is doing a major 1up on everyone, not just Zuckerberg.
"...creating its own clone social network..."
whatever happened to The "Superhero"?
then when regulators come calling about unfair search + social integration (assuming they make some inroads over time), they have a story already cooking, and a defense that social IS part of search, that goog's mission DOES involve social aspects.