Google+ Improves on Facebook
Google, the most popular Web site on earth, is worried about the second-most popular site. That, of course, would be Facebook. — Why else would Google keep trying, over and over again, to create a social network of the same type?
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands mid-arc in a campaign Google has been running since at least July 2010, when the Wall Street Journal first reported it was building a direct Facebook rival, followed by Technology Review's skeptical August 2010 ask of whether Google could ever get social networking right. Google+ is the answer to both: a network built around sharing with differentiated circles rather than one undifferentiated friend list.
The NYT framing — the most popular site on earth worried about the second-most popular — captures why this matters beyond product news: Google treats Facebook not as a feature competitor but as a structural threat to how people find and share information online. The same week, Google was broadening the social push on other fronts, taking Photovine's photo-sharing site live and expanding its Offers daily-deals beta to New York and the Bay Area.
First-order effects
- Facebook now faces a challenger backed by the web's largest property and its search distribution, competing on a segmentation model (circles) that directly attacks Facebook's all-or-nothing friending structure.
- Google's own product teams must fold social into Maps, Offers, and photo services like Photovine, turning Google+ from a standalone site into a layer across Google's portfolio.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's likely counter-move is on data openness and portability, where Google has already begun wielding interoperability as a weapon against it — a battleground that costs Facebook little to match rhetorically but much structurally.
- Daily-deals players and photo-sharing startups suddenly compete with Google bundling those categories into a social graph that reaches hundreds of millions of existing accounts.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social networking stops being a winner-take-all market owned by one graph and becomes an infrastructure layer every major platform — search, commerce, photos — must own natively.
- Repeated high-stakes attempts by a giant like Google normalize the idea that incumbent platforms will spend years and multiple product cycles to dislodge a social rival, raising the bar for what counts as a defensible network.
The trend: Platform-scale internet companies are converging on the social graph as core infrastructure, with Google's iterative assaults marking the moment social stopped being Facebook's moat alone.