Why I expect Google Plus to succeed
Recently Google launched their Google Plus social networking system, and as I write I haven’t been able to get into it, as I still need an invite, despite them having launched the Android client already, and despite the front page giving the impression that it’s open for business, only telling me I’m not welcome when I log in (and I’m normally logged into Google on my home laptop and desktop machines anyway; it’s only on public computers that I have to log in). That’s annoying, but I still intend to join as soon as I can, and I expect it to succeed. (Click here for the full size screenshot.)
Why? Because the time has come for a Facebook replacement, and Google has all the infrastructure in place necessary to blow them out of the water if they have a product that’s good enough, much as Facebook was in a position to do that to MySpace. Why did MySpace lose out? Because its user interface was awful — it was inconsistent, with some pages displaying in the user’s own theme and others not, and often the themes were image- and animation-heavy and slowed your browser down, or made the text illegible. Facebook doesn’t allow any of that, and its Walls, Groups and other features all look like part of the same site, and the FB colour scheme is pleasant and unintrusive enough.
However, they have a nasty habit of making unnecessary changes to the system which almost always prove annoying. Most recently, they merged Chat with Messages, effectively crippling the message system so that messages cannot have titles and have to be typed into a tiny box. Whoever heard of something so ridiculous as merging instant messages with a mail system, anyway? They have also vandalised the Groups system, removing the discussion forums, allowing people to add someone else to a group without asking them and instituting an equally irritating chat box, which does not go away when you navigate away from the group. Oh, and they do away with the group Info page as well. Not to mention having to press Shift+Enter to start a new paragraph when typing a comment (but not when typing a status update), making it easy to submit a comment before it was finished. Then there is the annoying and pointless “theater” pop-up which appears when you try to view a picture. Need I go on? Like mentioning the bugs, such as comments appearing then disappearing then appearing again, or it messing with your browser history, such that the entry for www.facebook.com has the title of the link you clicked when you last viewed it? Every time they tinker with things, they make it worse, and it has made Facebook much less pleasant to use than it was when I first joined.
Of course, Google Plus still has the same issues of being an advertising-supported free service, in which the customers are the advertisers, not the users, in which even more of our data is being held by one big corporation, which in this case has a history of selling its users out when it suits their commercial interests (e.g. to the Chinese secret police), but in this case the service does not need to have all of FB’s features to win over FB: Google already has Blogger, GMail, YouTube and Picasa, and as long as it does not freeze out, say, Vimeo, WordPress or Flickr users by preventing us linking our non-Google photos, blog entries and videos, it is likely to succeed if it is just less annoying than Facebook has become. Facebook has a month or so to sort out its user interface problems, or it stands to lose out, and deservedly so.
