Will Google+ Beat up Facebook? I Don't Think So

It’s been a while since Google launched its SNS Google+, to compete the world’s largest Facebook. Though the user-base of Google+ is continuously growing, the problems are still there, it’s not that easy to imitate the success of the giant Facebook after all. It actually has numbers of serious problems, the recent name policy for example, it seems they’re deleting profiles wholesale because they suspect that Plus users may be using handles other than their legal names. The problem is that a whole lot of people have very good reason to want to be pseudonymous online, and the name policy just made people feel uncomfortable.

I think a product, or an internet service must be based on the user experience, it has to focus on the users, as for social networking service, it at least makes people feel like home, or freedom, other wise people are going to hate it. From this point of view, Google+ is pretty lame, I guess it will never reach the high of Facebook. As the key feature of Google+, "Circles" enables users to organize contacts into groups for sharing, across various Google products and services. Although other users can view a list of people in a user's collection of circles, they cannot view the names of those circles. The privacy settings also allow users to hide the users in their circles as well as who have them in their circle. Organization is done through a drag-and-drop interface. This system replaces the typical friends list function used by sites such as Facebook.

As a new services, Google+ grows much faster than anyone expected, it is a pretty number, but I just couldn’t help to wonder, who are those peole actually, and why Mark Zuckerberg registered himself a Google+ account? Did those people come to Google+ mean they are going to move from Facebook once and for all or they will take the two service both, or maybe just simply due to curiousness? We don’t know yet, but I think we all know how hard to move our social circle from one to other, and change our patterns of use as well, maybe this is the reason why most of Google+ users are male, they either are geeks, or tech fans, none of them are cool enough to lead the new trend.

Go and ask those celebrities, rock stars, pop singers, actors and wrestlers, are they going to open a Google+ account? At least Sebastian Bach, the legendary rock singer, ex-front man of Heavy Metal band Skid Row doesn't know what it is and will not register an account on it either, according to his Twitter. Well, here is deal, many of people check on Facebook and Twitter for seeing someone, and I am one of them, without those “somebody”, who else you want to “like” or “+1”? Larry Page himself? Boring. It must be end up like a campus for geeks, nerds and weirdos. We can’t do them both either, because Nobody has any free time, unlike social platforms and TV, which can co-exist, you don't see people using Twitter while they're using Facebook, or using Facebook while they're using LinkedIn.

 I don’t think Facebook has anything to worry about. However, there is a whole slew of other companies that should be on notice.  One of the reasons why I think Facebook is safe is because it cannot be beaten with this unified strategy. Theoretically speaking, the only way to beat Facebook is through a thousand cuts. Photo sharing services such as Instagram can move attention away from Facebook, much like other tiny companies who can bootstrap themselves based on Facebook social graph and then built alternative graphs to siphon away attention from Facebook. Google, could in theory go one step further – team up with alternative social graphs such as Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr and use those graphs to create an uber graph.

While people use LinkedIn and Facebook for their professional lives and for socializing with family and friends respectively, Twitter gives people a way to share their thoughts with a broad audience. But the emergence of Google+ is creating imbalance in that mix.