I really want to see a decentralized system work. It's cool to see someone who has the time and resources to be a competitor taking on Facebook but in the end users data is given up to a third party.
Can Google+ beat Facebook by being a better Facebook? I don't think so. Twitter grew fast because they took a different route. Status.net continues it's movement due to it's decentralized ability and options (public, hosted/cloud/SaaS or run it yourself) and open source (social coding?) which it adds to the mix. Without significant differences I think many people will stick with Facebook or choose to not use a Facebook style social network.
Another thing I think Google+ needs to succeed will be a migration path for Facebook users. How can a Facebook user move their content over? Sure, we geeks can use API's or scrape our data and import but that doesn't help Joe Everyguy.
I'm also worried about the whole invite thing. This was done with wave and really hurt the application. A social network, especially a centralized one, needs to have people to socialize with before the network is viable for users. For the first few months of Twitter I didn't understand why it was interesting. Once friends I knew got on Twitter then I started to have some fun _and_ make new friends.
Being that Facebook and Google+ both sound like walled gardens and it's like Compuserve versus AOL -- just it's your personal data that you pay with. Hopefully Google+ will include a 'delete all my data and account' option which is actually clear and easy to find.
With all that being said, I'd still love to try out Google+ ... but I have a feeling that invites will be hard to come by.
Authored Comments
I really want to see a decentralized system work. It's cool to see someone who has the time and resources to be a competitor taking on Facebook but in the end users data is given up to a third party.
Can Google+ beat Facebook by being a better Facebook? I don't think so. Twitter grew fast because they took a different route. Status.net continues it's movement due to it's decentralized ability and options (public, hosted/cloud/SaaS or run it yourself) and open source (social coding?) which it adds to the mix. Without significant differences I think many people will stick with Facebook or choose to not use a Facebook style social network.
Another thing I think Google+ needs to succeed will be a migration path for Facebook users. How can a Facebook user move their content over? Sure, we geeks can use API's or scrape our data and import but that doesn't help Joe Everyguy.
I'm also worried about the whole invite thing. This was done with wave and really hurt the application. A social network, especially a centralized one, needs to have people to socialize with before the network is viable for users. For the first few months of Twitter I didn't understand why it was interesting. Once friends I knew got on Twitter then I started to have some fun _and_ make new friends.
Being that Facebook and Google+ both sound like walled gardens and it's like Compuserve versus AOL -- just it's your personal data that you pay with. Hopefully Google+ will include a 'delete all my data and account' option which is actually clear and easy to find.
With all that being said, I'd still love to try out Google+ ... but I have a feeling that invites will be hard to come by.
Email is how I get most communications still.