Zit Seng's Blog

A Singaporean's technology and lifestyle blog

Google Fights Back

For some time, I’ve been thinking and telling people about how not happy Google must be that everyone seems to be spending more time on Facebook than on Google content. For a company that depends on Internet users to generate its main source of revenue (i.e. advertising), and everything it does is about luring and capturing Internet users into its services and products, Facebook must be it’s biggest competitor. It’s their stiffest competition, even though they aren’t exactly competing on the same services or products.

Google’s numerous attempts to push ahead have been mostly complete failures. This includes services like Google Wave and Buzz. Do you even remember strange names like Orkut? That was another social networking attempt by Google. They have been trying to catch up on the social networking bandwagon for many years, but Facebook has pulled out far too ahead of them and everyone else.

This week, Google has thrown down the gauntlet, launching Google+ (although still limited public availability at this time) in its latest attempt to strike deeply into the heart of Facebook. It’s totally different from all its previous attempts at social networking. Instead of coming up with new ideas, new solutions, new approaches like they did with their other products, Google+ clearly looks like its inspired by Facebook. They are copying Facebook.

Copying is not entirely a bad thing. The old notion that “first to market” gives you competitive advantage is not true nowadays. It’s okay to come in later, but come in better. That’s what drove Sony’s success: first they copy, then they make better, and they make smaller.

So this time, I actually think that Google has a chance, a better chance than it ever had, with Google+. They are copying what Facebook does. Sure, Facebook has lots of third party applications, and that would probably take Google+ some time to catch up on. But at least in terms of core features, they are fairly similar. In fact, there’s a nice touch of improvement with the introduction of circles, which is a method of grouping contacts. Sharing revolves around circles, so privacy concerns are addressed directly and conveniently, something that Facebook has been struggling with.

Google+ has one interesting feature that caught my attention: Hangout. It’s how you and your contacts can come together to have multi-way videoconferencing. Yes, multi-way as in two or more parties! Google Talk only does one-on-one videoconferencing. This is definitely something new! Think of Hangout as like a “room” where people get together to communicate. Apart from voice and video, you can also use text chat. There’s something also about YouTube in the Hangout, but I couldn’t figure out what that was used for. I hope in future updates we could have the typical suite of collaborative features added in: whiteboard/drawing board, presentation slides, desktop, etc. Some of these are probably easy add-ons, seeing how Google Docs already has a number of collaborative tools.

The big question is whether Google+ will beat Facebook. It’s too early to tell (yup, this is just day 3), and Google+ has many things to catch up on. Too many things are already organized around Facebook (pages, groups, etc). There are so many third party applications. Last but not the very least, the huge installed base of Facebook users might find themselves reluctant to move.

But what Google has going for them is almost about the same things. They also have a huge installed base in Gmail users. Google has so many related services. Don’t forget that Google’s reach extends beyond online services into platforms (Android, ChomeOS), influence into enterprise (Google Apps), and other areas that Facebook hasn’t got a presence.

Google has to play their cards right, and keep up the momentum of excitement in users. They’ve finally got a real chance with Google+.

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