Social Wars

2011-09-23T12:48:00+01:00

Well it seems the next major technology war has kicked off on the web. Google has opened up its beta social service to all and sundry. At the same time Facebook have had another major face lift and announced their intentions to become a content hub for the Internet.

For me Facebook's latest move is eerily familiar of the early days of the web when everyone was vying to be the default web portal in the browser. It didn't work back then and companies like Yahoo have never really recovered from failing in the land grab. Back then everyone underestimated the demand for search that just worked and when Google offered something that broadly gave you relevant results the curated model of the web died.

However Facebook have a massive advantage now having captured 750m users who visit their site on a regular basis. They didn't come to Facebook to find cool places on the internet but to interact with their friends. Facebook didn't invent social networking but they certainly demonstrated that executed properly it was something that lots of people wanted. So far people have been very relaxed about Facebook's access to all that valuable social information and its use in advertising. Frankly any company that launches any sort of consumer product these days has to have some sort of strategy about how they will interact with Facebook.

Google have know that "social" is going to be a big thing for some time now. They have had several attempts to capture a segment of the market and Google+ is their most serious contender to the space so far. Their reasons for running the service are much like Facebook's although their principle advantage is not having to worry about how to monetise the service yet. Google's history has very much been developing ideas and seeing if they become popular before working out how to monetise it. Meanwhile it's a dangerous time for Facebook as they move towards an IPO where their long-term investors will be looking to cash-out on their investment. If Facebook start hemorrhaging users to alternatives its market value will literally disappear before the investors eyes. In the web-based world where a competitor is literally a click away the last thing they want to do is repeat the experience of MySpace. This would be especially ironic as Facebook was one of the major reasons MySpace went the way it did.

Who will ultimately "win" is an exercise in futurology that is a futile as predicting anything related to the fast changing world of the internet. I personally can't wait to move away from Facebook and to a service that gives me more control over my data. For now that is Google+ but it's by no means certain that's where it will stay. However one thing I'm sure of is the process of taking my data from Google and moving somewhere else will be a lot easier than the exercise has been from Facebook. Coincidentally it's probably the main reason why I'll be staying with Google for the time-being.

What do you think of these latest moves? Do you care who "wins" or what the services turn into? Or is the age of social networking the latest in a long line of internet fads that has already peaked?

Ponies and other requests

2011-07-21T13:30:00+01:00

So Google Plus is not even in beta, it's still a limited trail but they are soliciting feedback. Following on from Rich's suggestions here are some things I would like to see Google+ do.

Allow nesting of Circles

Circles are great. They are a pretty intuitive way of arranging your friends into groups. It's certainly way easier than Facebook's rather clunky friend lists interface. However I have a lot of people in multiple circles but it's a little inconsistent and it's hard to check people are in the right place. To illustrate here is a subset of circles I've defined:

* Fellow Geeks
* Cambridge Geeks
* Googlers
* Transitive Alumni
* #blue

Really the last four circles are all sub-sets of fellow geeks but sometimes it makes sense only to post to a sub-set. For example the Cambridge Geeks are those that are more likely to make a Geek Beer shout out. The Transitive crew are a special set of geeks that would appreciate some really obscure posting that might be irrelevant to the wider Geek community.

What I really want to do is declare Fellow Geeks as a super-set of a the other circles. It's not going to be a one to many relationship either. Cambridge Geeks also should belong to the Local People group because I don't spend all my time socialising with people just like me ;-)

Support Huddle in the browser

I like the concept of Huddle which is a group based messaging system in the mobile version of Google+. However currently it seems the only place to access is on a mobile device and that is currently Android only. To make it useful you should be able to access the Huddle from the browser as well.

Allow rolling up of comments

This is especially a problem with some of the higher visibility users that I follow. They can often have hundreds of comments attached to a post and there doesn't seem to be any way of hiding the comments. All you can do it "Mute" the whole post. Sometime G+ does hide "older comments" but the only thing you can do with them is expand them.

So like a good trail user I'm also raising these issues via the feedback option. I'm still enjoying the Google Plus experience and once I can post from Gwibber I'll be a lot happier. So what niggles have you found so far? Have you reported them?

Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - plus

Social Wars

Ponies and other requests