Not all that surprisingly, Mark Zuckerberg has been fairly quiet on Google’s social media entrant, Google+. On Sunday he mentioned them in response to a rather direct question during a BBC interview, in which he said…
“Yeah Google’s a great company and I think we want to look at and learn from everything that they do. But at the same time, people have shared a lot on Facebook and have already told a lot of their life story on Facebook. And we think that we have by far better tools for doing that.”
He’s towing the company line with the new Facebook featureset rolling out to create a timeline (that isn’t as good as Path 2.0′s) which will, eventually, tell the story of your entire life.
Unfortunately talking about things like that isn’t appealing to people. At least not from what I can tell. Facebook is a behemoth that’s playing itself up to be a cute, small company run by friends but I can’t see anyone believing that anymore. This is the Microsoft path of destruction. Internal belief that everyone outside thinks one way of you, but the reality is rather different.
Google, to stick to my analogy, are playing the Apple game. Keep etching away at the competition and worry exclusively about what you and only you are doing. They don’t care about the new Facebook timeline. They’ve their own features to implement and roll out. They’re slowly integrating their G+ systems in the core Google products (gmail, search) and eventually make every service they offer completely integrated. Much like Apple did with the iPod leading to Mac sales, and the way they’re blending iOS into OS X.
Google is an even bigger, arguably more evil company than Facebook – but Google+’s interface and “feel” is nicer than Facebooks right now… and that is more important to people. OS X was not as feature-rich as Windows for some time, but it was nicer to use… eventually the features caught up and were better integrated. I reckon this is where Google will go with G+.
