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Comment by fear91 | Hacker News Reader

After unsuccessfully shaping it as a Facebook-killer? Google's PR department won't give up :)

They never positioned it as a Facebook-killer. That's an artifact of the tech press. Like deelowe said, Google has been very consistent about this.

Cool. So at some point they will be integrating Facebook then.

You know because they aren't competitors or anything silly like that.

Really? Facebook represents a problem for Google: when your primary revenue source is display ads you want people to be looking at your adverts. Google+ is their solution to this problem - let people carry out the sort of things they use Facebook for, but on the Google.com domain (and with Google provided ads).

I think it's pretty clear one of the primary drivers behind Google+ is to reduce the amount of time users spend on Facebook and transfer it back to Google. The new 'Events' features are a good example of this.

The only reason Google aren't going around saying they're going to 'kill Facebook' is that it's only going to result in inevitable embarrassment. What Google PR says and how they develop their product strategies internally are very different things.

I made no comment on whether or not it was a competitor.

Yes, I find it similar to Wolfram Alpha. The creators constantly reiterated that it's not intended as a competitor to Google, while the press hailed alpha as a Google search killer.

Actually, Vic's message has been fairly consistent on this. He's always held that the goal of G+ is to integrate social features across the entire product line, not create another social network.

Whether its a top-down or bottom-up approach, the end goal is the same, right? Corral everybody into a Google universe, where Google (and its customers) can more effectively target you with tailored information (ads, etc) by tracking your interactions with friends, web sites, etc. Isn't that also what Facebook promises to its customers?

Just because they both operate in the same domain doesn't mean they are the same thing. Vic has maintained that the strategy with G+ is to integrate social features into the Google product line not build another facebook, myspace, orkut, etc.. clone. And he's specifically said many times that the strategy is much larger than simply competing with facebook.

The point is, G+ was never billed as a facebook killer. The OP who stated that is reiterating the media talking points (and pretending these are the words of Google execs). Vic's message has been consistent and concise. Does some G+ features overlap with FB? Sure, but the stated goal was never to build a facebook killer.

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