There seems to be more evidence of a cohesive strategy on Microsoft's part given their investment in Facebook and purchase of Skype.
On the other hand, given the invitation only rollout of Google+ it looks more like Google was forced to do something quickly before they were ready. Being first out the gate is a tactic, not a strategy.
As for Facebook having the kinks worked out - with the better part of a billion users they've got the big one solved.
@brudgers Google typically releases new products to the market slowly whilst announcing them, look back at services like Gmail, that was initially invite only and in beta for a number of years.
I doubt this is actually Facebook's answer to Google+ most likely something they've had on the cards for a while. They've still got plenty of time whilst G+ is in it's infancy.
Google also releases new products slowly and then lets them die. Gmail as a commodity product doesn't have the chicken and egg problem that a social network does - and there's no good example of Google solving a chicken and egg problem which depends on brand loyalty rather than technology (qualifications due to the possible argument that advertising revenue based search was a chicken and egg problem albeit one which was solved based on technology rather than consumer loyalty).
I don't think that Facebook/Skype is a response to Google+'s rollout. I think Google+ is a tactical response to a strategy has been developing for a long time (measured in internet years).
On the other hand, Facebook's announcement probably is a tactical response to Google's timing given the massive investment in buzz creation which has manifested itself in the last few days.
Android was successful because it was attractive to carriers and handset makers, but consumer faith in the Google brand had a lot to do with it, as well. I wouldn't say it was the deciding factor, but the fact it was made by Google rather than random company x probably influenced buying decisions.
> As for Facebook having the kinks worked out - with the better part of a billion users they've got the big one solved.
Not sure where you're going here... Facebook and video chat aren't synonymous, so how does having millions of users mean they're going to get it right?
> Google was forced to do something quickly before they were ready
Can you explain why you think Google+ isn't ready? What's "broken"?
Facebook has solved the big problem for social networks - lots of people use it.
The evidence that Google+ wasn't ready to be a Facebook killer is that it is invitation only. Living in a college town, I was around Facebook when it was exclusively for students. Facebook's growth from exclusive to pervasive was enabled by the fact that students move on get married and have babies - looking at pictures of her first granddaughter is what sold Facebook to mom.
On the other hand, the bloggers and programmers invited to Google+ will remain bloggers and programmers. They're already married and have kids and more importantly already update Facebook with photos for grandma and uncles.
Don't get me wrong, Google will make money off this thing even with limited adoption and the assumption that it will ever roll out of perpetual beta (or preview in this case) is not a settled matter based on Google's history.
You seem to forget that Google+ is in field trial, and was launched only 2 days ago. I don't expect any product as big as that to fully launch overnight.
"The evidence that Google+ wasn't ready to be a Facebook killer is that it is invitation only."
Google knows the best way to release a product - especially one in unfamiliar territory like the social space - is not to flip a giant switch and hope that when the whole world starts using it, nothing goes wrong. For one, the scalability issues when you're Google are enormous: they know they'll have tens of millions of 7-day users the first 7 days. You don't want to screw that up. That doesn't even touch on product design.
But taking a random sample of people and getting a hopefully-large-enough subset of their friends is not what you want for a social product: you want all of your friends in it, or you just get frustrated and go back to your previous solutions. Facebook /nailed this/ with their multi-year long staged rollout by targeting colleges: already self-contained social ecosystems where almost all of a student's friends are going to be other students; you start with one college, then two, then slowly ramp up until you can flip the big switch. Google simply does not understand this, and keeps falling back to their experience with Gmail, which was a fundamentally different beast.
"Everyone in the City of New York now has Google+: enjoy!"
(Also, I'm somewhat confused by the question, as I specifically demonstrated something that is akin to a suggestion by way of demonstrating what Facebook did right... why are you asking this? There are a million ways to do "invite closed communities rather than random people", like allowing Google Apps domains to join rather than people: that way you at least could get "my company/organization circle" or something; you could imagine inviting e-mail domains, so "anyone with ucsb.edu e-mail addresses now gets on", etc.: the problem is that I now know a small handful of my friends who are using Google+, but as most of my friends can't I will rapidly tire of posting there when I can post to Facebook.)
> The evidence that Google+ wasn't ready to be a Facebook killer is that it is invitation only.
That's evidence that Google's technical people aren't insane. You don't just throw open the doors to a project of this size. The technical implications of going from zero to millions of users on a new service are huge.
Well...so I might as well do a mea-culpa and confess my shortcomings to Sir Gates and the MSFT team. I must admit, at first, the $8.5B price tag seemed astronomical and it seemed that you were throwing shareholder's equity at a problem that needs to be solved with innovation.
But now, with the prospect of doing 'deep' integration with Facebook, your bet seems very prescient. Even if it was non-intentional, i.e. if you guys had no idea that Google would release Hangout, but talk about great timing.
If Microsoft can successfully integrate Skype into Facebook and expand their userbase even 2X, that's kinda staggering given the baseline number of 130 million they would be starting from.
All of a sudden the price seems like a bargain, if they can pull off something like this.
Skype is the incumbent. I regularly hear people talking about Skyping each other. FaceTime is going to need to connect to Skype to compete.
Google+ is in a pretty similar position - I chat with people all the time via Google Chat, and if there's video, I can use the same interface with a very low barrier to entry - I already talk to people every day using it. An Apple-only video protocol, by contrast, is basically just a tech demo for most practical applications. Unless you refuse to talk to people who don't own Apple products.
Does FaceTime have any kind of momentum behind it right now that Google, Facebook, or Skype/Microsoft would care?
Especially since Apple decided to replace Facebook Auth with Twitter Auth for native iOS integration, I think we can disqualify that relationship at this point.
Personally, I've used FaceTime twice: Once when it first came out to try it out, and once more this week (4 months later) to surprise my girlfriend while I'm travelling because I know she had FaceTime installed on her Macbook and it pops up unexpectedly when you call.
I do. Ever since finishing college and traveling frequently, I use it all the time to call family back home. It's more convenient than any other videochat solution and infinitely more personal than a voice call.
After visiting family in another state, they also picked up a FaceTime-compatible device (iPad 2) to easily videochat with my family back home.
The fact that you DON'T have to create an account (other than your Apple ID) or maintain "status" (a la IM) makes it much friendlier for my Luddite-inclined friends and family.
I have tried facetime exactly once when it came out.
I may use it a bit more in the coming months cause now my work team is split in three countries and we like to have video meetings.
But then again, it is more likely we will now use G+'s hangouts, since not everyone is a mac user.
But I don't understand... how is Apple is any more of a unique position to do this than anyone else? It seems to me that if Google is already using a documented open standard that it would make it more likely that Google+ becomes the video grand-daddy that others want to plug into, especially given the Android explosion, etc.
You have three players in the space, Microsoft/Facebook/Skype, Apple, and Google. Google and Microsoft/Facebook will not partner under any circumstances. Apple in theory could partner with either. This is why I called Apple a kingmaker.
You think the relations between Apple and Google are still strong enough to allow that? Since Schmidt left Apple's board and Android has been growing, I think the two companies would be unwilling to make deals on something as potentially important as video calling.
As didactic as that comment was, I suppose I could have said grandpa. I did use grandma, however, because I don't personally have any grandpas on my facebook, and in my own experience (and evidenced from this link) there are many more grandmas than grandpas on facebook:
Even then, however, I disagree that saying "grandma" in such a context is really that damaging. Maybe there's some point to this, but it seems unnecessarily politically correct to me.
Google+'s video chat barely works for me at all. Maybe it's because I'm in Europe, but the video chat is basically a big blurry mess. Skype is worlds better.
Gmail has also been offering a cross-platform "Google Voice & Video Chat" for some time now. Hangout will probably be a rebranded version extended to include video conference support.
"I know too many people who..." - this is not comment that adds anything new or interesting to discussion, it has 0 value to me or anyone here but if you provide valuable info about problems you see in Skype's technology or quality and how is G+ better, that + your honest opinion would be appreciated.
I have not used Google's hangouts. I'm on Arch Linux, so it'd be some work to do so; I cannot hazard opinions on it, but I was implying that competition is good.
My parents use Skype to talk to my grandparents in Russia weekly; I use it at times as well. I'm grateful for the technology. That said, it's not nearly as seemless (for me) as the phone, even beyond issues of finicky hardware (I'm on Linux, I don't expect much there): phone calls drop, frames stutter or disjoin from the audio, sound might warp, and so on. These are all things that sound like software issues (yeah, my pipe is only so big, but one could degrade more gracefully). I'm just hoping competition can improve things a bit, in a way that giving Skype even more of a stranglehold on the market would not.
I'm in UK. I was totally blown away by Skype's video chat on Christmas day when I first used it to chat to parents. Few drop outs but better quality sound than a phone call and video ... "we're living in the future" as they say.
I've polled my teenage daughter several times over recent years about this. She barely _talks_ on the phone anymore - texting is FAR and away the most common form of communication. Even (facebook) chat is not used that often. I can't imagine video chat being compelling for her and her friends.
Whenever the topic of video chat turns up, I am reminded of an aside in Infinite Jest[0].
> WHY [VIDEOPHONY FAILED]
> The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech.
It will depend greatly on how Facebook actually does this "deep integration" the article mentions. If they are just going to plug into skype and let your FB info become your skype username and pw, then adoption might not take off as much due to having to open and run a separate application to do anything. On the other hand, if they make each facebook chat a virtual skype call and incorporate skype sessions onto the backend, then I could see this improving chat and make adding video capabilities fairly easy. As for it taking off, if it requires no extra work then sure, their userbase might grab it and go. If it's just a plugin for skype the application, then I'm not so sure.
I don't think they are going to "just plug in to Skype" -- sources seem to suggest that there will be some sort of browser based experience. That said, they can definitely get a leg up on Google+ if they don't require you to download a plug-in.
Facebook indeed has similar features. But we should not simply compare features when comparing social platforms. Philippe Beaudoin made a very insightful post about this:
"For a social platform, the implication of turning a feature into a core part of the user experience cannot be overstated. It's because the real feature of social platforms are the way its user base exploits it. If only a few users rely on friends lists as a filtering feature, the feature might as well not be there. But G+ says: "Hey! Welcome! The first thing you should do is setup some filters!" Add a few thousand users and the bandwagon effect will turn G+ into a much different place than Facebook."
Facebook will probably soon cover the distance to google+, one way or another. The question is, is that enought to stop people (esp. early adopters) from using google+? The thing about facebook is it has become bloated, while google+ looks pure and clean. Similar to what happened to myspace.
Is video chat really popular? Other than for porn and families - sorry for the disturbing examples.
I remember when Yahoo! IM chat had video chat and it was all porn and even then only the really outgoing and pervs seemed to use it. This was in the days of Connectix quick cam "eyeball cam" and it was that was b&w, or at least the first ones were.
For some reason live video hasn't really caught on and even now it's not used that much at least by people I know. Is Facetime or Skype video used much?
Everyone has families, so that's a pretty big "other than". I live in a different country than my family, so I call them on Skype video 2-4 times a week.
I think video chat isn't done exactly right , so it hasn't become very popular.
You see this in many responses to google+'s group video chat. many say it's done right and want to use it.
Another hint is group telepresence for businesses. it's pretty successful even tought very expensive.
And some people who use video chat to remote relationships use it in a unique way: not the center of the experience but part of a shared experience.
So they put a video chat on a laptop and in their main computer they watch a synchronized movie together , for example.
And still the quality for most people isn't very good because of cameras and bandwidth issues.
So that's part of what exciting with google+ video chat. that they may finally get it right and at scale.
Arrington: "We’ve never broken an embargo at TechCrunch. Not once. Today that ends. From now our new policy is to break every embargo. We’ll happily agree to whatever you ask of us, and then we’ll just do whatever we feel like right after that. We may break an embargo by one minute or three days. We’ll choose at random."
My guess is that there will be adverts via FB, but ad-free when paying Skype directly for it.
Edit: To add that I hope Google offers a paid version without the data mining or adverts. I assume this is the monetization strategy for Google+, if someone knows differently, please let me know.
I wrote www.squarechat.com a while ago as a pet project, but it just seems like there isn't a good way to accomplish this without using flash or a plugin.
Hype does wear off fast. Luckily for g+ the hype is backed by substance, which isn't so quick to wear off. I think they're doing fine with the limited invite system and they have no reason to open it up faster than they can handle the load comfortably.
If this is true, Google+ with limited availability and limited geographic reach is essentially still born as a Facebook killer because there is no reason for your mom to switch.
Sure Google will mine some meaningful user data and Google+ will almost certainly be a success in terms of generating additional advertising revenue. But it's now even less unlikely to take off with consumers.
The problem is that Google+ is an attempt to solve Google's problem - shareholders' demand for a presence in "Social Networking," rather than solving an actual problem experienced by social networking service consumers.
I personally think Google's killer feature here isn't really a feature at all. It's the notifications on all Google properties.
As I'm using Gmail, search, documents, finance, whatever -- I get + notifications about friends, their updates, and photos. It's very distracting! But it also gets me to use the service more than I use Facebook -- and it's just started.
Facebook changes stuff all the time, and thus I would have to keep tweeking the settings. Instead, it all just goes into a circular file at Google which I empty from time to time.
And that's why Google+ circles don't aren't really a game changer - it doesn't significantly reduce the friction of managing notifications except for the small segment of people who are already interested in managing those notifications.
I had all e-mail notifications turned off from when I first logged into facebook. When they added the new groups I started getting e-mails again. I have to go into settings about once a month to turn off the e-mails in some different part of facebook.
You can add "+facebookcrap" (or anything else after the plus) to the end of your gmail address for things like that and the mail still hits your account, but it makes it really easy to filter out.
> The problem is that Google+ is an attempt to solve Google's problem ... rather than solving an actual problem experienced by social networking service consumers
I disagree that it's not solving users' problems. Circles seems to be an intuitive way to group people that you have different conversations with. Yes, FB has lists but IMHO circles is a better approach.
I agree that it makes sense - then again so do group security policies under Windows. And managing Circles will appeal to pretty much the same set of people who would find an afternoon of setting security policies appealing.
Circles are just not something which is going to cause a quarter of a billion people to switch away from Facebook - particularly given Google+ is invitation only. And even if that many people switched, Google+ would be half the current size of Facebook.
When I first signed into it, I thought that's how it would be, but what I've found is that as people added me, and I get the notification, I just add them to appropriate circles then.
I like that at least Google is trying new ideas. Consumers in general are experiencing problems in social networking. At least, they are not satisfied with current social networking products. I think a lot of people are looking for something better than what exists today. Google, with its scale, engineers, and obvious commitment to the social space, is in a position to make a difference.
If Facebook's video chat debut is anything like their text chat debut, I think Google+ still has the edge here. Facebook chat was (and to a degree, still is) pretty flaky. I've stopped holding my breath for new Facebook features because I find them to usually be buggy, especially when they debut. Hell, all day today my Facebook has been on the fritz. There's some random mesh of newsfeed/friend list on the right that is either the ugliest thing they've ever devised or somebody screwed up.
Also, a huge benefit of g+ that I saw somebody point out was that I get my social presence on other google properties like Gmail, Gcal, Finance, etc via the new top navigator bar. So I don't think G+ is only video chat.
Facebook looks to me like they're on the defensive... if FB aren't directly reacting to Google+, I hope they've had time to get the kinks worked out.
This is getting very interesting.