Damn, this thing is blowing up...to the point where I'm finding it annoying. I guess it'll die down a bit once the honeymoon period is over but jeebus I'm getting hammered with requests and updates.
I would be in sell mode if I was a big facebook stockholder/investor. Besides international I can't see user base growing too much more for facebook than it already is. With the dropoff from users going to google+ it seems like this will stagnate facebook user share in general. Once the momentum sways one way it could get ugly for facebook... I think its funny that zuckerberg thinks he is immune even though we have countless internet fads to reflect on like myspace ,aol etc. I could see facebook being the old address book, to check in on the chick you bagged in 1997, but not something used on a day to day basis. so those of you that have used it like it? Would like to hear users of it rate it on scale of 1 to 10 vs. scale of 1 to 10 for facebook? Interested to hear. I havent gotten around to getting it set up or doing anything with it. I am part of the user atrophy that didnt even make it to page 1. has anyone used the search feature? I find facebook search to be suckey
a little over the top. at some point, it becomes less about user growth than about monetizing those users. facebook hasn't even begun to monetize its user base like it ultimately could. in that sense, it still has tremendous growth opportunity... that said... absolutely. but, just like google could have become the next internet fad if, from a consumer perspective, it stuck just with search, facebook will have to continue to innovate to grow. google still generates almost all of its profits from search, but it has you as a consumer sticking with it because of how it's tied into everything else (gmail, android, picasa, etc.) if facebook can accomplish that, even with other social networks nibbling away at it, it will be a behemoth tech company for quite a while. Google+ is probably real competition, but for all its initial growth, those are still early adopters and they key is turning the rest of the world on to it. for someone like me, i haven't asked for an invite yet cause i don't care. maybe in the future i will if it really really picks up steam and then becomes the better option, but I'm a moderate social network user at best.
As a product, Google+ is already superior to Facebook as a "field test" beta product. As an experience, it's still not that great because the only thing that will make a social web experience good is for everyone to be on it. In my opinion, if I had the same list of friends on Google+ now that I already have on FB, Google+ wins, even in beta (this is a big deal). Google has made a huge investment in this and will not abandon this project as they have others; they are all in. From here on the service will only get better and integrate more of their platform services. I've just used it for a couple of days, but my initial thoughts are: - Yes, Circles is a very well-executed and badly needed way to organize our friends so we can share things and digest information the way we want. Yes, I know that FB has Groups and Friend Lists; they are horribly executed and stupidly difficult to employ, and I'm a geek. Circles is the iPhone of social organization. There is no question FB will respond with a similar feature; let's see how well they do. The fact that they've gone years with no solution to the social organization problem doesn't bode well for them IMO. - Video quality in my one use of Hangout was not great, definitely worse than Skype. However, I'm dying to get 5-10 friends on there at the same time and watch youtube and such. That is the killer app IMO. I have a ton of friends in other countries and having a group chat for free would be awesome. - Automatic uploads of mobile photos to a private folder makes photo sharing a lot easier. minus- After my 'Hangout' an update was sent to my feed saying I had a hangout and who it was with. Uh, that's lame over-sharing. I don't need it to be public knowledge who I chat with and when, and I shouldn't have to manually delete it from my feed. As for search, I don't know... the only search I see in google+ is for finding people. Since this is Google, this will likely expand. I agree that search on FB is is really unhelpful.
fine but that's a could and the biggest reason I would be selling. I wouldn't be worrying about 'could' I would be cashing out on what is 'already' To me the crescendo of facebook has been reached. I don't have a single share or penny invested in facebook so easy for me to say. I'm just predicting like any other hack that I think the peak of facebook was, and has been already reached. Yeah I could be wrong but seeing what has happened with others before(myspace , aol) it's also a real possibility it 'could' all go to sh** real fast. From a shareholder investor point of view even if it does go up I'm just not sold on it blowing up that much more. As an advertiser of google adwords ,I can tell you I won't be throwing anything to facebook before I do to adwords first. google has that advantage in the hand now not a 'could'.
I really enjoy it so far. Don't like putting numbers on things...but maybe something like a 7-8 for G+, 5-6 for Facebook. Feature-wise, they're pretty similar. But G+ does it so much better IMO. Circles are a good example, but it tends to go with other things too. I've enjoyed sharing/viewing photos quite a bit. Just the other day, I noticed you could scroll through photos using the scroll-wheel on your mouse, which I thought was really awesome. Quality in general just seems better on G+. Sparks seems interesting, although needs some work (that said, I've gotten some use out of it). Just started trying to "follow" people, ala Twitter. I've never really used Twitter, so it was a bit of a new concept for me. Kind of interesting, although Google needs some work here too. Turns out Chris Pirillo really likes to post stuff, so he's kind of filling up my default stream. Not a bad thing (better than following someone that posts nothing), but I'd like to separate his stuff from others in my circles...which I could do to some degree now, but it would be better it Google let you have more control over your stream...particularly the default stream. Combined with Sparks and maybe better integration with their other services, I can see myself spending a lot of time with G+ thanks to those features. Facebook does have the advantage when it comes to things like interests, group/company/etc. pages, apps, etc. I'd expect Google to implement those eventually (already mentioned something for businesses later this year), but that is probably one of the few things I "miss" from Facebook. Although I could do without games and other similar apps (e.g., "SomeGuyYouWentToHighSchooWith just answered a question about you. Click here to find out what."). Also, I'm stuck with a BlackBerry, so needs some better mobile app support (not that the Facebook mobile apps are that great to begin with, but they are available). I think the Huddle stuff is pretty cool, but as is, I can't really use it. I'm more or less ready to switch over completely. For the things I want, it delivers. Just need to get all my friends and family over to it. A lot of them already are (guess it helps when a lot of your friends are tech people who love this stuff too), but probably won't ditch Facebook completely until then. I need to change my profile picture to one of those clever "I don't always use social networks, but when I do, I prefer G+" pictures to help spread the word. As mentioned, the UI really only lets you search for other people, not keywords or anything. I think you can search G+ like you would any other site using Google, and I think it works OK, but haven't really used it much to be fair. Definitely would be an area that G+ should excel at, but that currently isn't the case. I've abused it way too much already. My coworkers have already recognized the fact that 90% of my G+ posts are just funny animated GIFs. G+ has also made me realize that not many people pronounce "GIF" correctly. But I try to keep it to myself.
FB will improve itself a lot because of the competition. It will have to care more about what people want. As much as I dislike FB, it will survive, do well and probably remain the largest "social network" for a very long time. It would take a real choke-job for them to blow it and become an also-ran.
Facebook already have over 100Mil people. Softwares is pretty easy to upgrade and improve on. Don't think Facebook is sitting around. One thing right now Google+ look like crap and exactly like Facebook so why would people switch over? Google+ is just for people who doesn't like Facebook or looking for an alternative so the only way for them to grab majority of people from Facebook if Facebook makes a big mistake in changes. Doesn't matter if Google+ came up with something much cooler but like I said softwares can be easily copy and incorporated.
I do think it would be hard to get people to switch, even if the software is much better (which I think it is so far). When I was importing some friends over from Facebook, I noticed lots of hotmail and yahoo email accounts (only a couple of gmail accounts). I threw up in my mouth a little bit. Although that was partly because I got queasy using the Yahoo mail interface to import the addresses in the first place. Yuck.
Oh, god, the Yahoo mail interface is horrible. It feels like every time they "improve" it, it just gets even worse.
