The web lacks experts who talk about the prospects and fate of Google+, a powerful social initiative from Google. Many of them relate to competition with Facebook and the main thing - whether it will be possible to overthrow Facebook from the leadership position.

I have a personal opinion on this, since I joined one of the Google+ development groups for 6-8 months after the Wave project was closed , and I know many developers and designers involved in this drama.

Usually, all the controversy goes on the topic “Is Facebook Facebook a killer”. Such an approach to the question looks strained with a touch of sensationalism, and I would like to argue in a calmer tone. In fact, the question is whether Google+ will become a successful product, whether a significant part of users will leave Facebook and whether it will be possible to deprive Facebook of its monopoly position in the social networking market. But before you express your point of view, let me describe the context.

About Innovation

It may surprise you, but I don't think Google+ is so innovative. Everyone notes that he took over the virtues of Facebook and added some distinctive features that are remarkably arranged. Sure, but personally I do not find it so interesting. In my opinion, Twitter was a much bigger innovator, and still remains. However, I do not think that pure innovation was the main goal.
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Circle History

A few years ago, even before the CEOs were preoccupied with social networks and services, an employee of the Google User Experience division named Paul Adams gave a presentation called Real Life Social Network . In his very long and well-illustrated presentation, he proves how huge the discrepancy is between the published content on Facebook and the interaction of people in real life. So, if you show your friends a photo of your adventures at a party, you don’t want your aunt and uncle, colleagues and occasional visitors to see this picture. But Facebook does not provide a good separation of this content. This was the main theme of the presentation, and Paul Adams explained his point of view with great persuasiveness and clear argumentation.

So when Google began a solid social network development, the powers that be laid eyes on Paul’s research and commissioned the development of Circles. This product was supposed to be the key difference between Facebook and Google+ (then the Google+ project was code-named Emerald Sea ).

As an introduction to Emerald Sea, my development team was once invited to a 30-minute presentation from the Circles development team. I listened politely, trying not to show my stunned by their incredible naivety. By that time, I was very tired of the extremely cumbersome development culture of Google. I have already told you before how the whole chain is not very suitable for rapid, iterative development and instant innovation. I asked an obvious question: “Although I agree that Circles are a powerful feature, but this presentation is publicly available. Surely someone from Facebook has already seen it, and in fact they do not need much time to implement this functionality? ”

They looked at me with sad eyes full of humility. They were aware of this danger, but they could only hope that Facebook would be unable to change its product so radically. At least, they will not be in time by the time Emerald Sea is released.

I laughed, amazed at their naivety. Facebook has a hacker culture, full of talents, and they work with fast, flexible tools like PHP. Especially if you compare them with the slow-moving dinosaurs in Google. (By that time, 200+ developers in more than three months could not do anything except the ugly buggy demos, and everyone was worried about the aggressive deadline that no one believed was in compliance with.)

Semicircle

Of course, Techcrunch soon began posting a leak after the leak as Facebook begins to block our secret project. They were preparing the reconstruction of the social graph, the new group system, and many other things. On the Google side, the despair of the developers was growing Some left Emerald Sea for the sake of other projects, while others even went to Facebook . I had the impression that the opinion of Paul Adams was not listened to (if you are not a developer at Google, so often). Many were clearly unhappy with the fact that the presentation was made publicly available, and soon it should have been published as a separate book. I even heard rumors that they tried to cancel or postpone the publication of the book.

I have no idea if this is true or not, but one day Paul Adams left and was accepted on Facebook . I was convinced that this was the last nail in the coffin lid. Developers outside the Emerald Sea released a malicious comment about the disgraceful failure of the project even before the official launch.

And then it happened - Facebook finally released a product that they were secretly working on as an answer to Paul’s theses. Tim lead from Facebook even allowed himself a public tweet with a ban to Google. Their product was called Facebook Groups .

I was shocked. Did I understand everything correctly? I quickly logged in to Facebook and checked in person. My former colleagues led the band in Google Wave and I even looked in there to make sure that I was not mistaken. But no - apparently, Facebook completely missed the point. There was no change in the social graph, there was no real incentive for people to distribute their friends into groups that reflect social circles in real life. And the feature itself was hidden on a tab somewhere in the far corner of the screen.

Full Circle

Then I remembered one phrase Circle Tim Lead said:

“We recognize the danger of this, but expect Facebook to be unable to change its product so radically.

I used to think that he meant Facebook’s inability to implement a technically feature that is in the core of the system. But I was wrong - the meaning of his words was that they could not change the logic of the service so fundamentally. Given such a huge audience, accustomed to the old site.

And now Circles launched as a central feature of Google+ and received a generally good rating from both the IT press and users. Wow.

Understand, I'm not trying to say that Circles is the only feature that will kill Facebook, not at all. What I want to say is that these two products play in different leagues. As Microsoft is struggling with online Office, it is also incredibly difficult for Facebook to make such fundamental changes in its product to respond to competitive challenges. It is for this reason that I think that Google+ is able to overthrow the Facebook monopoly.

Battle of the Giants

Of course, there are many other factors that need to be considered - some are more important than it looks in my story. For example, the social network Google+ is just a click away thanks to a panel that appears on every Google site. This is a good mark of the territory to ensure the deep involvement of users. And for the same reason, it can attract antitrust authorities. On the other hand, on the Facebook side, powerful network effects, so stealing at least a quarter of their 750 million users is a difficult, multi-year task. And Mark Zuckerberg has the time to once again demonstrate his supernatural ability to make the right decisions under pressure. So Facebook may well decide at some point that the time has come for a fundamental change, and do it.

Both companies will passionately fight for partnership with the main web players to accept their Like or +1 button. The importance of a mobile ecosystem (where Apple is now flirting with Twitter ). There are so many factors here that some things I mentioned may not have any effect on the result at all.

With all these reservations, I believe that although Google+ will not be able to take the place of Facebook as the largest social network, it will turn out to be a strong, competitive player and an alternative so necessary for all of us. Just like Chrome was for IE. Facebook will have an advantage over the audience, but it will not be dominant. I think that at the end of the battle there will be no monopolists left.

About the author : Dhanji R. Prasanna, Java programmer, former member of Google+ development groups and Google Wave, co-author of the Java API for RESTful Web Services , author of Dependency Injection .

Link to the original: rethrick.com/#google-plus