Why are so many people expecting this to be a "killer" when they have failed to gain much traction with their other attempts to compete with Facebook/Twitter. I don't know many people using Orkut, Wave, Buzz, Picasa, etc.
Wishful thinking? I know I want a Facebook "killer" to pop up soon. Network effects are what I hate & love most about the tech industry: why is it that something beautiful always has to be ruined once some player becomes big enough to dominate the space? PCs : Microsoft, Social Networking: Facebook, Mobile Apps: Apple
Personally I am more worried of a big company dominating more than one space. Say, I'm happy with PS3 to beat Xbox 'cause Sony is not a threat anywhere else, but Microsoft got the Windows/Office monopolies.
I am happy with Apple being strong in iPod/iPhone because they are weak in PCs. And I am happy with Google being strong in search, and Facebook and Twitter having the social network market.
If we got a Facebook killer from Twitter I'd love it. But from Google? I think they got enough fingers in enough pies for the time being. :)
At least Google has a policy of you owning your data, and of making it easy to grab all your data so you can move to other services.
So if they ran something like Facebook it would be much easier to compete with them outside of their ecosystem, unlike Facebook which tries to dominate all data submitted into their system.
What about Macs and Macbooks? they are making some serious progress over the last few years despite market domination by PCs for a long long time (almost everybody outside of design industry was using PCs). I think really great technology does eventually shine.
To be fair though, iPod and iPhone did play a big role to give Apple the "coolness" as a whole, perhaps that's the right strategy - attack from the sidelines.
Perhaps a mixture of both. To me I made the switch when I got both an iPod and an iPhone so getting a Macbook was somewhat a natural next step when I needed to get a new laptop. Didn't care too much about what's inside the machine, the different OS experience was a major concern at the time though.
* An Intel chip means that it's faster to run Windows (without the need for x86-on-PowerPC emulation).
* An Intel chip means that I can run Linux on it and still have access to closed-source programs (Flash, Matlab, etc).
* An Intel chip makes it possible to boot Windows natively.
* An Intel chip makes it easier for Apple to maintain forward momentum without needing to goad Motorola/IBM/etc to improve their PowerPC offerings to be competitive with Intel/AMD chips.
It's not as simple as that - they are a hybrid. An interface as easy to use as the previous Macs, hardware as cheap as a PC, an underlying OS as powerful as Unix.
> Network effects are what I hate & love most about the tech industry: why is it that something beautiful always has to be ruined once some player becomes big enough to dominate the space?
Well, that is definitely a good reason to wish that Google will take over social networking…
But Google already has one successful product, which Yahoo didn't.
It's more like MS. We all remember how badly Bob and those new phones failed. But they went from 0-to-success on the gaming console market, and they did it by capitalizing on their already-successful product ("Hey windows developers, click here to compile your existing game for xbox 360!")
Yahoo! has many successful products. The Yahoo! homepage, Mail, the category leading Answers, News, Sport, and Finance. Those are some of the biggest sites on earth, it seems a bit silly to pretend that Yahoo! doesn't have successful products just because you don't use them.
Yahoo has Yahoo.com, a product that brings in hundreds of millions of users even now. A day or two of placement in the home page is more than enough to launch any product.
I don't know about gmail specifically, but gmail which is part of Google Enterprise solution is "very" profitable as a unit.
You have to look at it this way. All Google's product and services are inter-connected. Unlike tradition software company like MSFT, google doesn't build products for the sole purpose of making profit from start. They make products, and they iterate and years from now if it reaches a tipping point they will start making money off of it. Most of google products are depended on each other's success. So saying things like "Is x product for Google profitable?" is a tricky question.
I am sure they have their separate internal account for each products (or maybe not), but as long as each product drives revenue to its profitable product, but individually not profitable; it makes no difference AFA google is concerned.
Google doesn't want to be social, they just want "social graph" data--two very different things. It's why they've failed.
Google needs to offer a compelling reason for people to transfer their profiles and hang around Google services in order to get the "social" part somewhat right. And then Google will succeed in getting the data they value most: the things you explicitly "like" or favorite, in this case,(with a bright yellow star). And that's where I think Freebase comes in--or so I hope.
I have mixed feeling about this.... yet another attempt by Google to get social.
I read an article somewhere else that the reason Google doesn't get social is because of its "geek" culture (no offense to fellow geeks, I'm just quoting the original article). Because Google is so technology focused, it sometimes loses its grip on human interaction.
I can't say I'm totally agreeing with that article but it does make some sense. Wave for example, technologically excellent and revolutionary, but really hard to use for a non-tech person.
I am not sure about that. Though I do think there is a certain feeling of elitism within Google, like all the brightest people are inside (which to be honest it's probably a pretty good assessment). So I am not sure how much they can get the very real but very (intellectually) shallow world of social networks.
Googlers seem to love to tackle hard problems (e.g. Wave and Instant search) but social networks are not a hard problem from an engineer point of view.
"Googlers seem to love to tackle hard problems (e.g. Wave and Instant search) but social networks are not a hard problem from an engineer point of view."
So the mentality goes: there's no motivation to come up with the next best social network, unless it can also simultaneously calculate the interconnectedness of every human being on this planet...
I'm hesitant about the social layers search stuff. Honestly, the data I put on the web is personal, and it deserves its own respect. Its not just a statistic. If my friend wants to know what I think about something they can email me.
I think it would be a brilliant move by Google to combine their separate services into something similar to Facebook. Google has all the parts, like video (Youtube), pics (Picasa), mini-blogs (Buzz), chat, and e-mail. They do all of this better than Facebook, and add Google Voice on top of it. It's just natural for them to start a social network that integrates all of these different parts.
I wonder what we actually want from "social". I know that I don't want to subscribe to some kind of friend spam merged with regular spam from advertisers or share "stuff" with people in my address book. That's totally useless for me and bloating all kinds of Google services with it will be annoying.
What I do want is collaboration, ad hoc collaboration, project based collaboration, etc. I want to connect and integrate my data with that of others with less friction than today. Google should go after Microsoft Office and leave Facebook to Zuckerberg's "dumb fucks".
I think it is interesting that Google said that Google Me will not be something that is standalone but suggests they are learning the lessons from the past.
Lesson 1: Keep Expectations in Check
They have announced it now for Fall, make sure they release in fall and if it is private beta, make sure that does not go for longer than 1-2 months. Keep the media in check
Lesson 2: Make Your Product Clear
They clearly need to state what this is and what is not. E.g. it is not Facebook, it is not Twitter it is a way to add more social functions and collaboration to your existing Google services
Lesson 3: Launch When Ready
Linked to point 1 but it has to have a good level of quality at launch.
Lesson 4: Have Real Value
If it replicates things I can get already from Facebook or Twitter it is not going to add value.
If it does allow me to get the best results from my private services (e.g. Facebook, twitter, Google reader) like Greplin but with instant search directly from my Google window that would be valuable.
If it gives me Rapportive but in a way that works in Gmail awesome. If it gives me Wisesync but in a way that works in Chromium also valuable.
If it lets me play video directly from my Gmail inbox or "like" something within my inbox or search and "stream" this to my social feeds
If it gives me a feature like mysixthsense within search or google reader or adds in Postrank as a google lab feature to inbox and search these would also be valuable to me.
It's an interesting thing to wonder, but I don't think Google has the juice to do this right. Recent evidence at least would suggest that it's more likely to fail than succeed.
Facebook / Netscape - Hotshot early player that does most of the early innovation, has near complete market penetration and doesn't quite hold on.
Google Me / IE4 - After a few feeble attempts, the product that successfully takes over through a combination of (a) being forced upon a gargantuan installed base and (b) being a pretty decent product, as a result of the prior iterations.
I wonder if Google Me will implement some search sharing elements and socialize the Google Search experience instead of offering another standard social network. A current web project of mine delves into this, but Google obviously has the resources to push this to the mainstream, similar to Google Instant, and make it much more valuable to users from the onset. It would be more risky than another standard social network, but much more relevant to their core search service. It's also interesting to speculate whether or not Google Me may be the social element around Google OS. We'll just have to wait and see.
This will be a good test of whether Google has learned anything from their previous failures - Wave, Buzz, etc. Both were excellent products technically and both failed to take off. I'm particularly sad about Buzz because it is much much better technically and feature wise than Twitter.
The problem is, I think the key to it is going to be something they'll never do - lack of integration. They have to totally utterly separate this from search and gmail. If they mix these things then it'll be yet another product where the public is confused and uncertain about what it is, what it does, and why it does it. It has to be simple - the way the original Google was simpler than any of its competitors. They have to remember their roots here. Do it simple. Do it incredibly well. Make it clean and unambiguous.
It's hard to pinpoint when, but I think at some point last year I stopped viewing Google as "special" and started considering them just one of many companies.
To me, Google was special because all their early products were made to solve very hard problems that me, among many other people had: search sucked, webmail sucked, etc.
That Google is dead, I'm afraid. Wave, Buzz, and now (probably) Google Me.. all products created with shady goals, terrible execution, disdain for privacy. Most importantly, they are products that NO ONE FUCKING NEEDS.
I'm still continuing using Gmail and Google for search because they are the best (although DDG is close, and I'm rooting for them). But I'm definitely looking elsewhere for anything close to innovation.
I misread that, thinking it was odd that Google would fall to copying Microsoft, and surprising they would copy Windows Me.
Reading about the product left me slightly less impressed.
Facebook already has social covered, and I've pretty much stopped using it. Buzz does not - Google don't get it, and they don't get that they don't get it. If Google Me was an upgrade to a desktop application, I probably wouldn't bother to install it. As it is, I'll look forward to having my cheese moved again.
Am I the only one who thinks that the idea that Google needs to "get into social" is a big mistake and a bad move?
They're being duped into spending a lot of time on energy on something where it isn't clear that they'll get the equivalent value back.
They already dominate advertising. What else is there to gain here? It's like Microsoft feeling like they need to create a competing search engine. The game has already been won.
I'm really interested to see how this goes. It's been a long time since Google released a "killer service." I'm really hoping Me is more than just a Facebook clone, and that they learned some lessons from Buzz (and Wave?).
I'm not sure most people would want their searching habits to be 'social' in that plenty of people want to Google for stuff in their own time without anyone else knowing about it.
This sounds like a good move from Google, do something akin to Facebook instant personalization in their other products, rather than creating the next facebook/myspace/bebo clone.
This is exactly what I don't want, more stuff forced onto me through my Gmail account. Stop using Gmail as a trojan horse please Google. They should just make a standalone clone Facebook that can integrate with Google's services, if desired. I really disliked the way Buzz was forced onto me and I really don't like the way that the new chat box won't go away and you have to manually hide each contact. Just buy Twitter and use their talent, you've got the cash and it's not really in Google's genetics for social.
Using your gmail as a username isn't bad. It makes it easy to know where to send you emails for account details and such. However, I think GMail needs a revamp if it's going to be the focal point of many integrated systems. What I don't want is another Facebook clone. A developer-centric social layer, to integrate various components of their developer infrastructure (google code/analytics/adsense, etc), could work. Could. They've got a bad track-record at "social".
I actually somewhat empathize with lotus's view that Gmail should just be Email and that's it. I think it is bad UX if people who just want email and not these confusing new "social" business have their software change in their face with disruptive noises.
I think Google is moving in the right direction when they introduced that account page / dashboard thing that acts as a hub for Google services. Unfortunately there isn't much besides just the list there for now. What I'd hope is for Google Me to expand on this idea and actually show people how they are related to the data Google has about them, and more importantly, what they can do with it.
Look at what they did with iGoogle. I don't like its loss of simplicity, but it would be a much better 'control center' for all these various offerings...
I think for this time, this is exactly what Google needs to do to kick facebook out of business. Facebook platform is a proven success. If Google clone it, they will eventually get users.
Google have other sources of income. But for facebook, its just "Facebook.com". If "Google" makes the clone and gets users, facebook.com is almost dead then (read like "myspace").
> If Google clone it, they will eventually get users.
That's highly unlikely. Facebook benefits from network effects so strong that Google would have to come up with something revolutionary in terms of social networking to replace Facebook.
> If Google clone it, they will eventually get users.
Why would anyone leave Facebook to join Google's ghost town? Further, Facebook is impossible to successfully clone because part of Facebook's inherent value is that it already has an incredibly large userbase.
> Why would anyone leave Facebook to join Google's ghost town?
You don't have to leave Facebook. And most importantly (and highly likely) you don't need to join the ghost town. You are already there if you are using GMail. Don't you know that after using Buzz?
True... though "clone it and eventually users will come" was Microsoft strategy, wasn't it? :D (ah, Microsoft, if you had only patented it! ;P ).
But I'd be careful to consider Google vs. Facebook a done deal. Yes, Facebook has only one service... but Google gets all its money from ads, a Facebook could potentially have a much better profile of its users than Google. If Facebook starts chipping at Google's ads de-facto monopoly, it will really hurt Google.
