Google+ Insider Look

Original author: Dhanji R. Prasanna
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The web is full of experts discussing the prospects and fate of Google+, Google’s powerful social initiative. Many of them relate to competition with Facebook and the main thing is whether it will be possible to overthrow Facebook from a leadership position.

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

Usually all the debate goes on the topic "Is Google+ a Facebook killer." Such a statement of the question seems tense 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 Facebook users will leave, and whether this will help to deprive Facebook of its monopoly position in the social networking market. But before expressing your point of view, let me describe the context.

About innovation

You may be surprised, but I don’t think Google+ is so innovative. Everyone notes that he took over the virtues of Facebook and added several distinctive features that are remarkably arranged. Sure, but personally I don’t 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.

Circle History

A few years ago, even before the CEO took care of social networks and services, a Google User Experience employee named Paul Adams made a presentation called Real Life Social Network . In his very long and well-illustrated presentation, he proves how enormous a mismatch 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, work colleagues and casual 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 reasoning.

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

As an introduction to the 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 astonishment at their incredible naivete. By that time, I was very tired of the extremely clumsy development culture inherent in Google. I already told beforeas the whole chain is not very suitable for fast, iterative development and instant innovation. I asked an obvious question: “Although I agree that Circles is a powerful feature, this presentation is in the public domain. Surely someone from Facebook has already seen it, and they don’t need a lot of 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 so fundamentally to change its product. At least they won’t be in time by the time the Emerald Sea comes out.

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

Semicircle

Of course, Techcrunch soon began publishing a leak after leak of how Facebook began blocking our secret project. They were preparing a reconstruction of the social graph, a new system of Groups, and many other things. On the Google side, the despair of the developers was growing stronger. Some left Emerald Sea for other projects, while others even went to Facebook . I had the impression that Paul Adams wasn’t heard (if you’re not a Google developer, that’s often the case). Many were clearly unhappy with the fact that the presentation was made publicly available, and soon it was to be 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 lid of the coffin. Developers outside the Emerald Sea have been giving offensive comments about the shameful failure of the project before the official launch.

And then it happened - Facebook finally released a product on which they secretly worked in response to Paul's theses. Facebook lead Tim even allowed himself a public tweet with a taunt on Google. Their product was called Facebook Groups .

I was shocked. Did I understand everything correctly? I quickly logged into Facebook and checked personally. My former colleagues led the group on Google Wave and I even looked 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 categorize 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 that the team leader Circles said:
“We are aware of the danger of this, but we hope that Facebook will be unable to change its product so radically.
I used to think that he meant the inability of Facebook to technically implement a feature that is in the core of the system. But I was mistaken - 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 the 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 tormented by the on-line Office, it is also incredibly difficult for Facebook to make such fundamental changes in its product to meet competitive challenges. It is for this reason that I think that Google+ is able to overthrow the monopoly of Facebook.

Battle of the giants

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

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

With all these reservations, I believe that although Google+ will not be able to take Facebook's place as the largest social network, it will turn out to be a strong, competitive player and the alternative we all need so much. Just like Chrome was for IE. Facebook will remain an advantage in terms of 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 employee of the Google+ and Google Wave development teams, co-author of the Java API for RESTful Web Services , author of Dependency Injection .

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

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