Google+ is Facebook++
- Tom Anderson, co-founder and ex-president of MySpace has suggested that Google+ looks good enough to beat Facebook and other social networking websites.
- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg joins Google+ and one of his early connections is current Facebook CTO Bret Taylor.
- The networking model of Google+ is more real. Circles help you distinguish between family, close friends and acquaintances, claims Google.
These are the popular stories of web world today. These stories are making noise because the wonder ball is now open. Google has launched Google+ [to few limited users]. And, it has started creating buzz in the industry. People were guessing about a similar product for long. Few leaked stories also talked about names like loop, circles, etc; but now we know it’s Google Plus. It’s not just another product from Google; they promote it as the future of Google. It’s not buzz or wave. This time they are much more serious and much more prepared.
But, as most of us ask in our circle – the real question is, why Google needed a product like this? The answer is simple. They want to dominate internet market. They are leaders in search, video sharing, emailing and they want to spread their wings to other spaces like photo sharing, group discussion, and social networking. They had products like orkut, buzz, wave but people at Google were not serious about this business, at least till the time Facebook storm took the internet to a new level. Facebook not only emerged as the leader in social networking space but it also become a threat for the core business of Google, emailing [Facebook’s social inbox] and search [Social Search]. Google had to response. And, they responded with a bang this time.
The challenges for others like Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster are different. They have to build everything from scratch. But, Google doesn’t face this problem. It has YouTube for video, Picasa for photo sharing, Google docs for document management, Gmail for email service, Android for mobile services and many more utility products. What they needed was a product which can integrate all these utilities and give users a platform to plug and play at a single dashboard. They seem to be winning this race by launching Google+ . Yes, it does provide a single dashboard, a simple look, filled with some powerful features.
But, it doesn’t mean they don’t have challenges. They do have challenges. The challenge for Google+ is not to attract users but to maintain the simplicity it has right now. People have started liking this product because it is simple. It is not clustered and it is not noisy. But, that could be because there are not much people. And, there are not much applications. Going forward when there would be a crowd of users, developers and applications – the real test of Google+ will begin.
The biggest challenge with Facebook at the moment is that its competition is with Google. Not because Google is a giant name in internet world but because Google has a highly diversified sources of revenue. If Google+ fails I don’t think there will be any significant impact on Google revenue model. But for Facebook the only revenue generator is their website. FB may have different ways of generating money like advertising, gift shops, gaming applications, etc. but all of them converge to their website only. In simple terms it’s just a web-site and that’s it. Moreover FB is not public. It’s still a privately held business. So there is a very high risk involved if FB looses battle with Google+. I think FB needs to mitigate this risk. The sooner it does the better it will be. It’s high time they can at least make stock appearance by issuing an IPO as a first step towards risk mitigation.
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@Mazhar Abbas – I don’t see money as a problem for Facebook. They have billions of dollar. They can easily sit back and make strategy as how to counter Google. But, they surely have a problem. They do not have a strong product portfolio like Google. They will have to build everything [needed] from scratch. That’s the biggest challenge they have.
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Yes, but the problem is what that money will do if Google takes away social networking, FB’s ONLY business? Product portfolio is the same thing that I am refering to as revenue source in financial terms. When you have a good product portfolio, you actually open up multiple threads for you to generate money. That’s exactly what I am talking about. FB just has one revenue model. They haven’t created any asset other than FB with the billions of dollar that they have kept secure in their safe. If you use money after the business is taken away, it will not be possible to get back in the game because it will be too late, specially if you have a fight with Google. Moreover loyalty factor for social networking users is very less. We have seen this when users migrated from Orkut to FB. So it won’t take much time for users to shift loyalty to Google+. I am saying this because we are talking in context of Google.
Mark Zuckerberg may be one of the youngest billionares but as a company what revenue diversification does he have when it comes to fight with Google? With IPO at least they can mitigate the risk.
I completely agree on loyalty part. Users don’t have loyalty for these products / services. If they find something better, more interesting – they will quickly jump the wagon.
And, about not building a strong product portfolio – Yes, they must look into this now. They tried to buy companies like GroupOn and Skype, but failed. They must try to succeed in such buyouts if they can’t diversify internally.