TL/DR: An interesting, adjective-heavy story about how Facebook and Zuckerburg responded to the Google+ competitive threat between 2012-2014. Zuck likened it to Roman conquering and Facebook went temporarily into "Lockdown" with seven day workweeks. Anecdotes suggest Facebook worked Sundays more often than Google. Otherwise pretty light on content.
I really hate this kind of article. Good writing has a summary of the most important stuff at the top and then drills down into various interesting aspects. Thanks for the TL/DR, I had given up after the first paragraph.
It's safe to say the target audience of this piece was not the Hacker News demographic. More product dev detail would have lost most people. Unfortunately.
Thank you. I stopped reading after a few paragraphs in which the author discussed several different definitions of the word genius and where he listed things that Zuckerberg is not. It was pretty clear that the author was desperately trying to fill the pages.
I can't imagine ever loving my employer this much. And heaven help whoever tells me I'm on "lockdown" so I can't leave the building and I have to work weekends.
I don't think anyone loved their employer that much. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. I'll assume there was lots of eye rolling on both sides as their leaders rallied them all around the idea of trading users cat pictures for their ad impressions.
Your salary/equity/etc. vs. your value on your personal life either make overtime worth it or not.
Well, its not that hard to imagine. For hundreds if not thousands of years, people has been fighting to the deaths for their lords and kings. A few weekends is nothing really.
I'm not even on board with the first one. It's a financial transaction for my services. I'll be nice and polite, but I'm not going to enter into some personal relationship where I can be pressured to tender those services as a favor or for some kind of social capital.
If you don't love what you do you are basically committing yourself to 40+ hours a week of unhappiness. Not to mention the fact that people who love what they do tend to do a better job, and improve more over the long term.
I really encourage you to find a way to view your work that lets you love it, or do something else.
"Love what you do" is an employer tactic to maximize value and minimize cost of their employees hoping they'll work extra for passion instead of more money.
Unless you have substantial equity it's not your company. Don't be passionate about a profit, control, or ownership you were very intentionally cut from.
In this case the employer desires to run their company without paying you or dealing with you because they don't want you there. But as of today, they need you. If tomorrow they decide they don't, you'll be packing your boxes. Remember that.
If you enter into a work relationship where you are nice then you open yourself up for abuse and favors. People stop respecting your time and ideas and you slip into the role of company bitch. Set boundaries and never hesitate to leave if things are not in your favor.
It took 150 years of worker struggle to get a minimum wage, a civil war to get rid of slavery, and decades of violence to get rid of child labor. You are a worker. Remember what you are selling to the employer. Don't foolishly give away your labor capital. Maximize your own profit and minimize your own cost.
However, if you own a commensurate share, then disregard all of this as it doesn't apply.
Sometimes you genuinely enjoy doing something, and would do it for free if you had a way to pay the bills. I had a job like that for a few years, and it was nice. Didn't matter to me how much my boss made or who owned what. I was having fun.
Most jobs aren't like that, though, and no matter how much you love something you eventually get tired of it.
Oh, none of that was really doable at the time. It was a DoD contracting job, and the way they structure the contracts you pretty much either accept what they give you or you leave. Which I eventually did.
If you feel you are being taken advantage of, negotiate a better salary, or go somewhere else they will pay you what you believe you are worth.
Assuming you're at a job where you're being compensated in line with your abilities, you can either choose to view what you do as burdensome labor, or as a fun challenge. The only difference between these two views is that one will make you depressed, and the other will make you happy. How do you want to feel?
Facebook is notorious for this. It is 100% a legitimate cult. Don't worry about wondering if someone works at Facebook or not. They'll be sure to tell you.
I went from G to FB (which I left shortly afterwards) and I can tell you that FB isn't anywhere near as close to being a cult as G is. Not hearing the word 'googley' 10x a day was alone a substantial improvement.
There is a certain appeal to committing to something 100%, to pushing it absolutely as hard as you can. But the cause has to be worth it, because you are going to sacrifice everything else: friends, family, the basic enjoyment of life. I don't see how anything FB is doing is remotely worth that kind of sacrifice.
Under False Imprisonment FB could lock the employees in, just as long as the employees didn't know they were locked in at the time of being locked in (i.e. they only found out later after FB unlocked them) ;)
No, and this isn't what Facebook did internally. "Lockdown" was more of a way of thinking about the problem and cover for working longer hours rather than literally locking the doors to prevent people from going home.
Was it really a war? I don't believe anyone thought Google Plus would've actually stood a chance, and now it looks like G+ is splitting to many little micro-services such as spaces, Allo and Duo.
Not the mention the whole YouTube users being constantly harassed to input their real name which gave G+ an even worse taste in their mouths.
Yes, it was a war. There were plenty of earlier social networks, like Friendster and Myspace, who probably looked down at upstarts like Facebook, shortly before getting killed by them. Facebook was in a good position, but it certainly wasn't invincible.
And Google isn't just any competitor. This was back in the days when Google could do no wrong. They conquered the world in search. They conquered the world in email. They were starting to conquer the world in mobile. They had some of the best engineering talent in the world. And they were now pointing all their guns at Facebook. I can certainly imagine why Zuck was shitting bricks. Kudos to him for pulling out a win.
I'm not sure, but my instinct is that Google's decline had started by then. Sure, they bought their way into email by giving away storage when everyone else was charging for it. But the usability had steadily gotten worse over time. When did the new compose experience launch compared to G+, for example?
Google's slide toward doing wrong started earlier, and you can argue over when, but I'd attribute it to Gmail.
It's one thing to have my search history. It's another to have my search history, identity, and email.
I resisted the pull of Gmail for a long time. Yes, I created an account (to forstall others from doing so, and, oddly, a highly distinctive name proved taken in multiple iterations, or at least unavailable, when I tried registering it). I've simply moved to using email very little.
G+ put the stink in though. I really wanted to like the service. I used it early on, and still do. I wanted it to be the anti- Facebook (which I do not use, or trust).
But multiple from the top decisions made, and still make it, exceptionally difficult to like. Sadly, there's little better (and I've looked).
> Was it really a war? I don't believe anyone thought Google Plus would've actually stood a chance
It absolutely was, but Facebook didn't so much as win the war, whereas it was Google who shot themselves in the foot and lost. All they had to do was not be Facebook and they would have won, but they had a lot of missteps. Real name, and google-wide single sign-on caused immediate hesitation and started the fall.
> I don't believe anyone thought Google Plus would've actually stood a chance
I know that I certainly did, and in fact for awhile my Facebook image was something along the lines of, 'I've left for G+!' Sadly, not many folks made the transition, and I'm back.
Funny timing on this story — I've recently been reading some of the Indie Web Camp stuff, and discovered that diaspora came out in 2010. It seems like just yesterday! Even back then we were worried about a Facebook monoculture, and hopeful in competitors.
Google's main assault couldn't break Facebook; diaspora couldn't either. I don't know what will, and that worries me.
At this point, nothing will. I still see people come up with arguments that myspace was in a similar situation,but FB is nothing like MySpace. Users have spent more than 10 years sharing things, sticking to them and there's no way to step them from it. But what other companies can do is to try create services which helps certain kinds of people. Like people typically use FB for news, friend's know how, photos, random viral videos and if a company can take off users from FB by creating a better way to read news or share pics, there might stand a chance.
The way to unseat an established network is to build a network no one controls, which makes it the obvious alternative for anyone dissatisfied with the monopolist. Decentralization yields powerful network effects, and we're all about to watch it unfold. If you want to be a part of it, dive into the decentralized application communities that are forming around Ethereum and IPFS.
> which makes it the obvious alternative for anyone dissatisfied with the monopolist
All twelve of you?
I mean, I respect the effort, but people by and large aren't dissatisfied, while those who are dissatisfied aren't dissatisfied in such a way that makes them receptive to "nobody else is here, but you should be" services.
"That unfortunate first impression, plus the mischaracterization in the film The Social Network, was probably responsible for half of the ever present suspicion and paranoia surrounding Facebook’s motives. But occasionally Zuck would have a charismatic moment of lucid greatness, and it would be stunning."
The lockdown thing is interesting, but you have to wade through this blathering, fawning, puff-piece nonsense. There are many more such gag-inducing sections in this piece. Good luck.
I read about "facebook's motives" and other companies motives, and suspicions about this and that in the media and I think - why do people bother? Companies like Facebook and Google and Apple have billions of users and 99.999% of them just do not give a shit about any of this drama. If they didn't like Facebook (or Android, or... etc) they'd just stop using it.
I guess it's just "gotta write a story....gotta make a dollar...gotta get some ad impressions" or whatever, but..really..does anyone actually give a shit?
> If they didn't like Facebook (or Android, or... etc) they'd just stop using it.
I don't like Android, and I am not using it.
But I have to use facebook because some real life events that I should attend are organized on Facebook.
Similarly WhatsApp. I give it no permissions, which makes it a little awkward as I have to memorize (or lookup) phone numbers; But I have missed several important announcements when I wasn't on WhatsApp.
By the way "this blathering, fawning, puff-piece nonsense" is what some call an actual prose style. Perhaps you've heard of it (if never actually seen it in person).
I'd almost pay money to read your review of a Franzen or DFW book.
It's straight-up glurge with highly flawed "analysis", ledes buried deeper than mafia turncoats, and very, very, very little substance to show for itself, much of that apparently unconscious or strongly secondary to the main story.
It's crap writing, on style, viewpoint, and logic.
This is cargo-culting. Do you really think FB's success is due to frequent lockdowns? They are successful because they've got network effects, people are used to using their site/app and there is no incentive for people to switch - it's already free, you can't go lower than that.
I don't follow this train of thought. Did those users make facebook? Run it's servers? write it's code? Sell it's ad space? Every product and service in the world only exists because of consumers, but there's nothing owed between the parties. Facebook provides a platform for it's users. The users use it. They don't own it anymore than you should "owe" your local grocery store because you buy vegetables there
I didn't say Facebook exits bc its users. I said its monetary value exists bc its users. Have you ever bought Facebook ads? The users are what's being sold, not the ad (i.e. FB doesn't make the ad, but asks you what users you want to see the ad).
I'm not saying FB owes me anything, but niether does YouTube who manages a revenue sharing program with its content creators (users). Btw those users didn't create YouTube, run their servers, write the code, etc...
They got there by people telling everyone around them to join (same with WhatsApp, Snapchat etc.). Company just keepes the sites/apps running, but when it comes to building network effects - that is something people do themselves.
You know, back when I riffed on the great poem "Ozymandias" in the context of Zuckerberg and Facebook[1] I thought maybe, just maybe I was over-reaching on the whole ego-drive thing with Zuckerberg, but after reading this, not so much.
No no no no that poem is very clear. Ozy built a giant statue to himself to lord over all that he ruled upon. When the narrator came across the inscription, all that was left was the pedestal and the feet of the once giant statue. Just as the statue had disappeared into the sands of time - while the inscription of bragging remained - so had the kingdom.
The point of the poem is akin to "the bigger they are the harder they fall" if you will.
Zuck should have read Sun Tzu instead of Cato - "If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by." I'm not sure how much of the G+ failure can really be attributed to any particular activity of FB as a company.
Yeah, it seems like launching G+ as a Google integration product to force people into G+ was dumb step one (so G+ wound-up immediately disliked by more people than it was liked, including me as involuntary recruit). It seems like Google's in-practice more draconian real names policy was dumb step two.
The "social must be everything" Mantra that Google was chanting then was annoying and ridiculous. But part of the situation was the company didn't want to just create a useful service for people but rather wanted to impose a situation where people's identities could be monetized by Google.
Facebook has had trouble monetizing their product and I suspect they're safe because every company with the resources to produce a UI and service as useful as Facebook is going to want have such a service impose more conditions, be oriented towards quicker monetization, etc.
Even MySpace could have persisted if they'd focused on providing things Facebook didn't - but no one wanted to extend credit to them to do and creating this stuff apparently costs a lot of money for a significant amount of time.
I agree, it looks like the demise of Google+ is direct effect of mismanagement by Vic and integrating everything (YouTube, Gmail etc.), not any kind of Zuck's "genius".
If you knew the other side of the story - how folks at Google felt about G+ - you'd know what I mean. Historically there's been a ton of internal pushback against many C-level decisions. Killing Reader was one instance where we had petitions, public outrages and a few ragequits. But nothing ever came close to how demoralizing G+ was. Lots of folks genuinely believed in G's "mission" and joined the company to make the world a better place. No, seriously, a ton of people believed it. Seeing how cynical G's play against FB was and how willingly G trampled its core values in the process lots of people simply lost faith in the company. Most of them stayed but the magic was gone. I think at some stage it became clear that if you push this pedal to the metal the company will simply implode.
That corresponds strongly with my (outsiders) view, and conversations I've had with a few Googlers. Though I'm also aware that decisions at _any_ organisation can be unpopular, and in a large company, you'll have responses.
Agreed, my cringe-pipes have ruptured. It was nice of Facebook to acknowledge the author of this article on the roof of their headquarters though.[0]
People were suspicious before the film, Facebook is an immoral business, and Mark Zuckerberg is nothing more than the world's most notorious panty-sniffer.
Uh, pretty obvious that Google Plus just wasn't a product that could stand on it's own merit.
Just like Microsoft's terrible tablets weren't done in by any other tablet maker, and were cursed with enough problems to get a cold shoulder at the cash register.
I don't even use Facebook, but it's pretty obvious that it's purpose built to do specific things, and does them well, if that's what your Jonesing for.
You could tell, open handed, that people would not be interested in the idea of the product, by the way it was executed, by the undertones of its justification for existence.
It was a product mandated for the sake of a company's bucket list at best. To earn a gold star for trying. To mark off a checkbox.
The whole thing reeked of groupthink, from a mile away. Censored behavior. Courting celebrities. Requiring real names. Activities restrained by pretense. It stank of corporate influence, of lunchtime business meetings, of shareholder concern. Poochie the dog, rastafied by 10% or so.
Nothing about it felt natural. Everyone has to wear clothes. No cursing please. Place your cigarette in the appropriate receptacle.
Worse still, all things were clearly designed to funnel back into some other thing at Google that was more impotant to the bottom line. Endorsements, trending interests, who's reading what, written by who, and so forth.
It wasn't designed to tickle the user. None of that is why people come to the internet and keep coming back. Not regular people.
You could tell that the people invloved in crafting the reason for Google Plus' existence were people who pay their taxes. Who drive safely, even if they drive expensive cars. Who spend their lives trapped inside a ribbed condom. Yeah, it's a condom, but it's a ribbed condom. So much better!
Facebook is also guilty of many of these sins, but it's what they do, it's ALL they do, and they don't get in the way of people behaving badly, or at least not in ways that would preclude them from just trying to have fun on a website they don't actually need to use. And that's where Google really crossed the line, by trying to needle people into jumping on the Google Plus bandwagon, and then by telling them to sit all proper and cross-legged too.
Huh? Vanity Fair is a frequent source of important and interesting journalism...they've been writing a lot recently about the tech scene, but have also had classics such as: http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/1996/05/wigand199605
Facebook didn't need to do much. Google Plus was frightfully annoying on its own. It made no sense to people the on boarding process, to the point where google plus made it easier to create new google plus accounts, people didn't want, without their knowledge than it was to get help from google on anything.
As many have said already G+ did the job on its own. But what's also important was the crucial time at launch.
These were the days when the people coming to Facebook in 2008, 2009 were a bit fed up by it and wanted to try something else with hosting pictures, events etc. So they actually were the most interested in trying in out, hey it was a Google product and everyone loved Gmail. But Google screwed up and placed an invite system.
I don't know if they weren't prepared for the scale or wanted to copy Gmail (it worked once, amirite!) or the Facebook being exclusive at their beginning.
The times were different though and if you slam the door before someone eager to try out your stuff, guess what, he won't come back. So after couple months when the invites were a bit more reachable, the initial interest was wasted and left an aftertaste in people.
Making a social media platform invite only was such an obvious mistake, I'm surprised a company like Google made it. The product in G+ was not the platform but the potential social element of it (the user's friends and family).
"Hey here is an invite to this thing that none of your friends can get on"
1. Yes, Facebook have won the Social war. To date.
2. Yes, Zuckerberg managed to avoid technical errors and tarpits, mostly, to get there.
3. No, the "Lockdown" thing had little to do with it. If anything it may well have been counterproductive.
4. God what a horribly written, horribly analysed piece of glurge this is.
5. Harvard.
6. Google shot themselves in the foot. Repeatedly. With tremendous technical ability. With tremendous effect. Taking a service I wanted to like, wanted to find useful, and wanted to support, and uttershly gobshiting it.
Put the blame squarely at the feet of Vic Gundotra. And more squarely: at the feet of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt. The rot does straight to the top. All four men did a tremendous disservice to Google, torpedoed massive amounts of brand equity and consumer trust, and have done very, very, very little to redeem it.
I've dug at G+, critiqued it, analysed it, and compared it with other alternatives. All in the hopes of finding a decent goddamned place for intelligent conversation online.
Hell if I know where it's at.
(HN is a small piece, but only a small piece, and not without its own major faults.)
> How about Facebook’s first version of Search... mostly useful for checking out your friends’ single female friends
A minor dig but this is the sort of subtle male-centric POV that should be filtered out of tech journalism. Straight women use Facebook too, check out profiles. What's more, they constitute 4/5ths of Vanity Fair's readership.[1] This is speaking to women, subtly telling them that tech is mainly tools for guys.
Comes up all the time in other contexts. Like I was watching Tinker Bell the other day, and it's basically 100% femmy fairy girls EXCEPT they made the nerdy techy builder characters boys. I'm like, come on...
FWIW, this piece is an adaptation/excerpt from a book written by "former Facebook employee Antonio García Martínez". He may only be repeating hearsay, of course, but he may have also been privy to the analytics or internal discussion that indicated how Search was being used.
When you're up against a strong incumbent, don't attack your opponent where he is strongest, or at least don't do that in the opening game. Look for where he is weak instead.
Google+ didn't lose because Facebook used any particular counter-attack. It lost because it basically set out to copy Facebook, which constituted an attack where Facebook was strongest; why would anyone use it when they could use the original, which had more people on it? Google should have tried doing something different. Maybe drop the real names policy, maybe allow open programmatic access, I don't know enough about the domain to be able to say for sure exactly what, but they needed to provide some reason for at least some percentage of users to switch.
This is a fluff piece, that much is certain. To summarize it
1. Mark Zuckerberg is the Messiah, albeit with human traits of failure. (Makes a messiah more relatable)
2. Google pooh poohs Facebook
3. Google sits up and takes notice as Facebook's users pick up and Vic Gundotra's kids and their friends tell Vic that Facebook is where they are at and Vic goes to Larry Page and whispers warnings in his ears.
4. Larry bestows knighthood on Vic to wage war on Facebook.
5. Vic looks at the Google Landscape and thinks "I bet I can get 400 million users by bombarding Google properties with G+ buttons but that would be too easy so I am going to only allow people with invites to become users. Come on I need a challenge!!"
6. Zuckerberg looks at G+ and Google's search users and thinks "Holy God in Heaven! My flock is under attack"
7. Zuckerberg ushers his flock into the pen and closes the gates.
8. The flock sits in the pen and does what they had been doing though a little more carefully now.
9. Vic looks at the barren landscape of G+ and thinks "There's no one here. I better put cardboard cutouts of people here so Larry doesn't revoke my knighthood"
10. Mark's flock looks at the cutouts and laughs their asses off. They drink some more Kool Aid.
11. G+ is burned to the ground by all the bombardment Vic did and Vic tucks tail and leaves.
12. Mark opens the gates of the pen and his flock are let out and they rejoice. The author of this article thinks Mark is a genius for herding all his flock into the pen and hunkering down.
13. "That's how you "lead" wars, bitch", proclaims the Messiah.
To be honest Zuckerberg could've taken an annual sabbatical and it wouldn't have made a jot of difference to Google Plus's future.
When G+ came out Facebook was pretty damn popular amongst my peers and younger friends and colleagues. G+ had some interest I'll grant you but the big question to everyone I know was 'Why? I have Facebook.' Despite that I and a lot of friends signed up. The problem was that Google's social network felt like a geeky waste land. Like a place where you post things that you don't care if anyone else sees.
Pity because from what I understand their photos app has uncanny facial recognition and auto tagging capabilities. Their email clearly is solid. Hangouts is also pretty damn good. Google have so much opportunity in the social space if they could tie all these services together in a compelling way but they really seem to be missing some key ingredients - thoughtful leadership perhaps?
The tie in was flakier in the past, and at some points in time was done in a strong-arming way, which killed a lot of goodwill (YouTube unification, real name policy -- enforced from day 1 much more vigorously than Facebook and applying to old gmail accounts, ...) and there was not enough to start with anyway). Couple that with the Buzz fiasco before it .... But that would not have mattered if FB wasn't there.
The real problem is network effect: Most people were already on Facebook, and maintaining two presences (FB and G+) was a chore. So most people kept to FB. Everyone I know kept their main profile on FB, and had a "professional" or "interest-based" profile on G+, which naturally saw about 10% or less activity.
"Google Circles, a way of organizing social contacts, shamelessly copied from Facebook’s long-ignored Lists feature."
I thought it was the other way around - circles were based on a research by a guy from Google, who left later for Facebook and they built similar feature.
I feel like the headline and intro to this piece are misleading. It doesn't actually describe anything Zuck did product-wise, or how the fight actually played out. It's just some anecdotes about what Facebook was like during this period and a lot of pretty grand statements about Zuckerberg.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadThat said, I pretty much agree with you. I've lost my patience for magazine-style journalism.
Your salary/equity/etc. vs. your value on your personal life either make overtime worth it or not.
Precisely, in a way.
I really encourage you to find a way to view your work that lets you love it, or do something else.
I even know an airline captain who complains endlessly, and that's still a dream job for most kids.
In those circumstances the coping mechanism is to desensitise and decouple so as to treat those 40 hours as simply an enabler for the other 128.
"Love what you do" is an employer tactic to maximize value and minimize cost of their employees hoping they'll work extra for passion instead of more money.
Unless you have substantial equity it's not your company. Don't be passionate about a profit, control, or ownership you were very intentionally cut from.
In this case the employer desires to run their company without paying you or dealing with you because they don't want you there. But as of today, they need you. If tomorrow they decide they don't, you'll be packing your boxes. Remember that.
If you enter into a work relationship where you are nice then you open yourself up for abuse and favors. People stop respecting your time and ideas and you slip into the role of company bitch. Set boundaries and never hesitate to leave if things are not in your favor.
It took 150 years of worker struggle to get a minimum wage, a civil war to get rid of slavery, and decades of violence to get rid of child labor. You are a worker. Remember what you are selling to the employer. Don't foolishly give away your labor capital. Maximize your own profit and minimize your own cost.
However, if you own a commensurate share, then disregard all of this as it doesn't apply.
Most jobs aren't like that, though, and no matter how much you love something you eventually get tired of it.
People are more careful with expensive things and treat them better.
You aren't working at the leisurely indiscretion of the company.
You become a more efficient, effective, objective, focused and self-directed employee when you focus on and realize your cost/value proposition.
Of course if you were working for a foundation or charity then sure... This doesn't apply.
But for a few years it was great.
Assuming you're at a job where you're being compensated in line with your abilities, you can either choose to view what you do as burdensome labor, or as a fun challenge. The only difference between these two views is that one will make you depressed, and the other will make you happy. How do you want to feel?
I mean, they absolutely cannot. We have a term for that; it's called 'kidnapping'.
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
Not the mention the whole YouTube users being constantly harassed to input their real name which gave G+ an even worse taste in their mouths.
And Google isn't just any competitor. This was back in the days when Google could do no wrong. They conquered the world in search. They conquered the world in email. They were starting to conquer the world in mobile. They had some of the best engineering talent in the world. And they were now pointing all their guns at Facebook. I can certainly imagine why Zuck was shitting bricks. Kudos to him for pulling out a win.
It's one thing to have my search history. It's another to have my search history, identity, and email.
I resisted the pull of Gmail for a long time. Yes, I created an account (to forstall others from doing so, and, oddly, a highly distinctive name proved taken in multiple iterations, or at least unavailable, when I tried registering it). I've simply moved to using email very little.
G+ put the stink in though. I really wanted to like the service. I used it early on, and still do. I wanted it to be the anti- Facebook (which I do not use, or trust).
But multiple from the top decisions made, and still make it, exceptionally difficult to like. Sadly, there's little better (and I've looked).
It absolutely was, but Facebook didn't so much as win the war, whereas it was Google who shot themselves in the foot and lost. All they had to do was not be Facebook and they would have won, but they had a lot of missteps. Real name, and google-wide single sign-on caused immediate hesitation and started the fall.
I know that I certainly did, and in fact for awhile my Facebook image was something along the lines of, 'I've left for G+!' Sadly, not many folks made the transition, and I'm back.
Funny timing on this story — I've recently been reading some of the Indie Web Camp stuff, and discovered that diaspora came out in 2010. It seems like just yesterday! Even back then we were worried about a Facebook monoculture, and hopeful in competitors.
Google's main assault couldn't break Facebook; diaspora couldn't either. I don't know what will, and that worries me.
All twelve of you?
I mean, I respect the effort, but people by and large aren't dissatisfied, while those who are dissatisfied aren't dissatisfied in such a way that makes them receptive to "nobody else is here, but you should be" services.
The lockdown thing is interesting, but you have to wade through this blathering, fawning, puff-piece nonsense. There are many more such gag-inducing sections in this piece. Good luck.
I guess it's just "gotta write a story....gotta make a dollar...gotta get some ad impressions" or whatever, but..really..does anyone actually give a shit?
I don't like Android, and I am not using it.
But I have to use facebook because some real life events that I should attend are organized on Facebook.
Similarly WhatsApp. I give it no permissions, which makes it a little awkward as I have to memorize (or lookup) phone numbers; But I have missed several important announcements when I wasn't on WhatsApp.
Try harder next time.
I'd almost pay money to read your review of a Franzen or DFW book.
It's crap writing, on style, viewpoint, and logic.
You could give the users ownership of the multibillion dollar platform whose monetary value only exists because of its users.
I'm not saying FB owes me anything, but niether does YouTube who manages a revenue sharing program with its content creators (users). Btw those users didn't create YouTube, run their servers, write the code, etc...
[1] https://medium.com/@6StringMerc/zuckermandias-d1fa241c4d56#....
The point of the poem is akin to "the bigger they are the harder they fall" if you will.
The "social must be everything" Mantra that Google was chanting then was annoying and ridiculous. But part of the situation was the company didn't want to just create a useful service for people but rather wanted to impose a situation where people's identities could be monetized by Google.
Facebook has had trouble monetizing their product and I suspect they're safe because every company with the resources to produce a UI and service as useful as Facebook is going to want have such a service impose more conditions, be oriented towards quicker monetization, etc.
Even MySpace could have persisted if they'd focused on providing things Facebook didn't - but no one wanted to extend credit to them to do and creating this stuff apparently costs a lot of money for a significant amount of time.
But G+ seemed to push the strain quite high.
People were suspicious before the film, Facebook is an immoral business, and Mark Zuckerberg is nothing more than the world's most notorious panty-sniffer.
[0]: http://media.vanityfair.com/photos/5750966534d59c8547b429f5/...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11832595 and marked it off-topic.
Just like Microsoft's terrible tablets weren't done in by any other tablet maker, and were cursed with enough problems to get a cold shoulder at the cash register.
I don't even use Facebook, but it's pretty obvious that it's purpose built to do specific things, and does them well, if that's what your Jonesing for.
Honest question: how was this obvious?
It was a product mandated for the sake of a company's bucket list at best. To earn a gold star for trying. To mark off a checkbox.
The whole thing reeked of groupthink, from a mile away. Censored behavior. Courting celebrities. Requiring real names. Activities restrained by pretense. It stank of corporate influence, of lunchtime business meetings, of shareholder concern. Poochie the dog, rastafied by 10% or so.
Nothing about it felt natural. Everyone has to wear clothes. No cursing please. Place your cigarette in the appropriate receptacle.
Worse still, all things were clearly designed to funnel back into some other thing at Google that was more impotant to the bottom line. Endorsements, trending interests, who's reading what, written by who, and so forth.
It wasn't designed to tickle the user. None of that is why people come to the internet and keep coming back. Not regular people.
You could tell that the people invloved in crafting the reason for Google Plus' existence were people who pay their taxes. Who drive safely, even if they drive expensive cars. Who spend their lives trapped inside a ribbed condom. Yeah, it's a condom, but it's a ribbed condom. So much better!
Facebook is also guilty of many of these sins, but it's what they do, it's ALL they do, and they don't get in the way of people behaving badly, or at least not in ways that would preclude them from just trying to have fun on a website they don't actually need to use. And that's where Google really crossed the line, by trying to needle people into jumping on the Google Plus bandwagon, and then by telling them to sit all proper and cross-legged too.
These were the days when the people coming to Facebook in 2008, 2009 were a bit fed up by it and wanted to try something else with hosting pictures, events etc. So they actually were the most interested in trying in out, hey it was a Google product and everyone loved Gmail. But Google screwed up and placed an invite system.
I don't know if they weren't prepared for the scale or wanted to copy Gmail (it worked once, amirite!) or the Facebook being exclusive at their beginning.
The times were different though and if you slam the door before someone eager to try out your stuff, guess what, he won't come back. So after couple months when the invites were a bit more reachable, the initial interest was wasted and left an aftertaste in people.
And you don't want that.
"Hey here is an invite to this thing that none of your friends can get on"
2. Yes, Zuckerberg managed to avoid technical errors and tarpits, mostly, to get there.
3. No, the "Lockdown" thing had little to do with it. If anything it may well have been counterproductive.
4. God what a horribly written, horribly analysed piece of glurge this is.
5. Harvard.
6. Google shot themselves in the foot. Repeatedly. With tremendous technical ability. With tremendous effect. Taking a service I wanted to like, wanted to find useful, and wanted to support, and uttershly gobshiting it.
Put the blame squarely at the feet of Vic Gundotra. And more squarely: at the feet of Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt. The rot does straight to the top. All four men did a tremendous disservice to Google, torpedoed massive amounts of brand equity and consumer trust, and have done very, very, very little to redeem it.
I've dug at G+, critiqued it, analysed it, and compared it with other alternatives. All in the hopes of finding a decent goddamned place for intelligent conversation online.
Hell if I know where it's at.
(HN is a small piece, but only a small piece, and not without its own major faults.)
More: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/SCqMujFZ...
A minor dig but this is the sort of subtle male-centric POV that should be filtered out of tech journalism. Straight women use Facebook too, check out profiles. What's more, they constitute 4/5ths of Vanity Fair's readership.[1] This is speaking to women, subtly telling them that tech is mainly tools for guys.
Comes up all the time in other contexts. Like I was watching Tinker Bell the other day, and it's basically 100% femmy fairy girls EXCEPT they made the nerdy techy builder characters boys. I'm like, come on...
[1] http://www.condenast.com/brands/vanity-fair/media-kit/print
Google+ didn't lose because Facebook used any particular counter-attack. It lost because it basically set out to copy Facebook, which constituted an attack where Facebook was strongest; why would anyone use it when they could use the original, which had more people on it? Google should have tried doing something different. Maybe drop the real names policy, maybe allow open programmatic access, I don't know enough about the domain to be able to say for sure exactly what, but they needed to provide some reason for at least some percentage of users to switch.
1. Mark Zuckerberg is the Messiah, albeit with human traits of failure. (Makes a messiah more relatable)
2. Google pooh poohs Facebook
3. Google sits up and takes notice as Facebook's users pick up and Vic Gundotra's kids and their friends tell Vic that Facebook is where they are at and Vic goes to Larry Page and whispers warnings in his ears.
4. Larry bestows knighthood on Vic to wage war on Facebook.
5. Vic looks at the Google Landscape and thinks "I bet I can get 400 million users by bombarding Google properties with G+ buttons but that would be too easy so I am going to only allow people with invites to become users. Come on I need a challenge!!"
6. Zuckerberg looks at G+ and Google's search users and thinks "Holy God in Heaven! My flock is under attack"
7. Zuckerberg ushers his flock into the pen and closes the gates.
8. The flock sits in the pen and does what they had been doing though a little more carefully now.
9. Vic looks at the barren landscape of G+ and thinks "There's no one here. I better put cardboard cutouts of people here so Larry doesn't revoke my knighthood"
10. Mark's flock looks at the cutouts and laughs their asses off. They drink some more Kool Aid.
11. G+ is burned to the ground by all the bombardment Vic did and Vic tucks tail and leaves.
12. Mark opens the gates of the pen and his flock are let out and they rejoice. The author of this article thinks Mark is a genius for herding all his flock into the pen and hunkering down.
13. "That's how you "lead" wars, bitch", proclaims the Messiah.
sarcasm
When G+ came out Facebook was pretty damn popular amongst my peers and younger friends and colleagues. G+ had some interest I'll grant you but the big question to everyone I know was 'Why? I have Facebook.' Despite that I and a lot of friends signed up. The problem was that Google's social network felt like a geeky waste land. Like a place where you post things that you don't care if anyone else sees.
Pity because from what I understand their photos app has uncanny facial recognition and auto tagging capabilities. Their email clearly is solid. Hangouts is also pretty damn good. Google have so much opportunity in the social space if they could tie all these services together in a compelling way but they really seem to be missing some key ingredients - thoughtful leadership perhaps?
The real problem is network effect: Most people were already on Facebook, and maintaining two presences (FB and G+) was a chore. So most people kept to FB. Everyone I know kept their main profile on FB, and had a "professional" or "interest-based" profile on G+, which naturally saw about 10% or less activity.
I thought it was the other way around - circles were based on a research by a guy from Google, who left later for Facebook and they built similar feature.
http://mashable.com/2009/10/09/create-facebook-friend-lists/