Peter Svarre - Strategies for your digital business

There can be only one!

It is always extremely difficult to say something intelligent about a recently launched social community, because most communities tend to change shape and only find their real purpose in life after users have spent some time there. Myspace started as a music community, but developed into a general community for the cool kids. Facebook started as a… facebook, but developed into the phone book and social backbone of the internet.

Google+ is a little different because Google’s manifest strategy is to be a Facebook killer and because the influx of users has been massive in the first week that the site has been live. There is so much social activity happening on the site already, that it is actually possible to see some of Google’s underlying intentions and the site’s potential.

First of all it is very clear, that Google+ is a frontal assault on Facebook. Google has not tried to find a niche or a certain angle which has not been covered by Facebook. Google+ is basically, in my opinion, a complete Facebook clone with some improved usability and design. The consequences of this are quite radical, because in the business of being the social backbone of the Internet THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!

Facebook had reached the stage where it had basically become the phone book and the common standard for social activity on the Internet. If you wanted to find someone, you could more or less always find them on Facebook, and if you wanted to tell people about your life, you could post it to Facebook, and be relatively sure that your update would be shown to anyone who cared (enough for Facebook’s algorithm to show the update).

Yes – there were competing communities like LinkedIn, Twitter or asmallworld.com, but most of these sites where neither the phone book nor the social backbone of the Internet – they where niche sites catering to specific target groups or specific uses.

Google+ is different because it is not a niche site. Google+ is aspiring to be just as much phone book and social backbone as Facebook. Just look at how the +1 button has already been added to sites around the Internet, and look at how easy it is to add new friends to Google+. If Google+ keeps on growing with the same pace, we will soon find ourselves in a situation, where there is no longer a common standard for being social on the Internet. Should I update on Facebook or Google+ ? Should I upload pictures to Facebook or Google+? Where should I find people? Which profile should I always make sure to keep updated?

In my opinion there is simply not room for two general social networks, because the basic premise of being THE social network is that this is the place where (more or less) everyone is present.

So who is going to win the war? Who is the ONLY ONE in the war for being the general social network of choice?

Many people have been talking about the future demise of Facebook – comparing it with the ill fate of Myspace. But despite Facebook’s many faults and shortcomings it is still a community in tremendous growth around the world and it is a site that has managed to lock in the users to a degree where it is almost impossible to leave the site. Even the most ardent Google plussers keep posting to their Facebook profile about their experiences with Google+. Leaving Facebook is – for many people – still very much like loosing your identity and your social relations.

Other people have been talking about the end of days for Facebook, because the site is simply no longer the place for the cool kids. But this is a misunderstanding based on an unfair comparison with Myspace, which lost its glory when it stopped being the underground, cool community for the select few. Facebook has never been like Myspace. Facebook is not for the cool kids. Facebook is for everyone. It is the Facebook, where you can be sure to find everyone you need to find. There is absolutely nothing cool about Facebook – just like there is absolutely nothing cool about a phone book. Facebook is a useful tool that it is very difficult to live without in the networked economy. Facebook is not going to die because it becomes uncool, because it was simply never cool in the first place.

People have also been talking about Facebook’s death from arrogance. Making it difficult for people to control their privacy settings and the settings for who sees what, and taking the ownership of people’s photos and videos has been seen as an arrogance, which eventually would lead to the demise of Facebook and the victory of a competitor with a less arrogant attitude. But in a world where – to use the words of Zuckerberg himself – “privacy is dead”, most people don’t actually care a lot about privacy settings and the ownership of their digital photos and videos. Most studies of internet users younger than 25 show that this generation doesn’t really care about privacy and the separation between public and private profiles. This generation is sharing their life in the shape of text, photos and videos with everyone – be that their father, friends or future employers. The ones who need separation between Friends, Family, Business and Acquaintances are the digital immigrants – the ones who used to live in a world where there was no internet and no social networks.

So Facebook is by no means a dying community suffering from Myspacitis – just waiting for the next and slightly better community to push it off the throne.

And the problem about Google+ is that it is actually just a slightly better community. The design of Google+ is super cool and almost Apple like. The functionalities in the user interface are smooth and generally very intuitive – considering that we are talking about a week old child. And the Circle functionality, where you can sort your friends into different groups is very well executed, although I do fear the amount of work you will have to put into keeping this sorting updated when you pass the 500 friends threshold. Friends and acquaintances do, after all, change status along the way. Colleagues become friends. Friends become lovers. Sports buddys become colleagues etc. etc.

If Google+ had been launched in a world where there was no Facebook or where Facebook had less than 10 million users, then there is probably no doubt that people would choose Google+ over Facebook. The site simply works more smoothly and it integrates more or less seamlessly with all of Google’s other services which are used by a majority of people on the Internet.

But the problem is that Google+ doesn’t really have that ONE thing that makes it THE ONLY ONE. It is a little better here and there, but is that enough to uproot your entire digital life and move from Facebook to Google+? For a lot of techies and social media freaks it is natural to throw themselves into the fray, which is why we are seeing a massive influx of users on Google+ right now, but what about everyone else? Will people who don’t care about Zuckerberg vs. Page actually invest the energy it takes to create a new digital identity?

I may very well be wrong, but I don’t think that Google+ is going to dethrone Facebook. Google+ will probably explode in number of users, but after an initial storm I expect that Google+ will settle down and become the social glue between all of Google’s applications, but it is not going to be neither the phone book nor the social backbone of the Internet.

Along the way, however, we can hope that the blietz krieg success of Google+ is going to scare Facebook into thinking a little more about privacy, usability and responsiveness to user’s demands. Google+ may not be the future ONLY ONE, but it may very well provide the shakeup which makes Facebook even better than it is today.