It’s sy to draw comparisons betweenFacebook and Google+. Sure, the two products are both “social networks” in which you can add friends, share content, and interact. But the two are actually very different and serve very different purposes. A lot of people in the press decide to use hdlines like this to make an interesting story, but once you rlly dive into ch product experience, you can tell that the two are not alike at all. There is one battle though, and that’s a battle of developer agility, uniqueness, and user base. That’s the only “vs.” here.The purposeThe purpose of Facebook is to connect friends and friends together, so that you can keep in contact with them. Facebook is where you announce a new relationship, show everyone who your mother is, and get kudos on your birthday. It’s a very personal experience, and with the new timeline profile display, the experience got even deeper and more personal.Google+ on the other hand is more about discovery. Discovery of content, and perhaps making some new friends, or being impressed by a current friends interests in a new way. Sure, Facebook has a news feed and you can watch the links and s trickle in there, but Google+ has a different experience, one that now includes srch.Google+ is driven by srch, and Facebook is driven by human connection.It’s a classic Robot vs. Human. There’s no “winner” here, the two are different experiences.The agility
I’ve been watching Facebook and Google very closely for the past few yrs. The last Six months has been the most active for the two companies when it comes to social. It’s not so much a fture war, it truly is a battle of quality.Facebook has done amazing things with Photos and s, and most people take it for granted. Its service is rarely disrupted, the way it displays photos and are elegant, and it’s amazing to think that these projects were started during a famous Facebook athon.Google+ is Google’s first rl social venture. The company has been working on it for yrs we’re told, and it shows. The Google Hangout experience is amazing. People think of Skype first when they think of conferencing, but honestly Google+ destroys them with its handling of a large room of people talking in a hangout. The switches as people talk automatically, that alone is absolutely awesome.The speed is not as important as the quality of the work, but both companies have exhibited that ch can do both. No wonder the two are battling for talent. The survival of the fittest is at play here.The businessAgain, this is a man vs. machine model. Sure, Facebook has aorithms, but those aorithms are based on interpersonal relationships and interactions. Google doesn’t focus on connections so much that we can see yet, and as usual is focused solely on data.There is no “winner” here yet. I have said for yrs that “the people are the platform”, and I still believe it to be true. The people who use a service are vastly more important than the service they’re using. Zynga would not be so popular on the Facebook platform unless there were people obsessed with playing its games and sharing every single mundane milestone they hit on said games.Facebook flopped with project “Bcon”, its way of using people to sell product. However, seeing Spotify’s rly success on Facebook’s platform shows the true power of people.Spotifyis going to be a huge company with huge success, and huge profits.Google on the other hand bought YouTube. A purchase that goes overlooked quite a bit, and that’s exactly what it wants. We all use YouTube, and Google has added its srch and Adsense infrastructure to it, and it’s a bst.Two different models of monetization here using two different approaches.The end gameYou may very well want to use both services. It truly shouldn’t be a one or the other, or a one is better than the other thing. Black and white doesn’t apply here. Things aren’t binary, even when it involves computers.Facebook will be around for a long time, don’t believe the hype-creep on that. The company is not MySpace, and Mark Zuckerberg is not Tom. He is brilliant, the tm he surrounded himself is brilliant, and its doing things to enable us to engage with people we haven’t talked to in yrs, and people we talk to everyday in ways we didn’t think were imaginable.Google has opened up the world’s information for us. By typing a word into a srch box, we can immediately get all of the information that we want. In seconds. Remember when you forgot who starred in that you liked? You had to call your brother, mom, uncle, cousin, and best friend. That was BG. Before Google. Google changed the world, and continues to do so.You may complain about changes, and you may complain about ftures, and you may want to start a vs. war with Facebook and Google and that’s fine, because everyone is entitled to an opinion.The rl truth is, that we use these services for free. We do absolutely pay with our information and data, but that data is something we’ve shared since the beginning of time. It’s just now being stored.Why not use Facebook and Google+? You might end up being the true winner.
Source: The Next Web
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