The New Hotness

Everyone's talking about the new hotness. Google+ walked in the door, threw its hat in the ring, and proceeded to do to Facebook - the reigning champion - what FB did to the previous champions MySpace and Hi5.

All of a sudden the game changed. Everyone is raving about G+, and everyone wants in on the ground floor.

I was a (relative) latecomer to the game. Despite all my self-proclaimed geek cred, YT didn't get an invite until Day 3. But watching the way things are developing is an education in and of itself.

Google+ - if you didn't know by now - is a social media system created by Google to go head to head with Facebook. But the important bits are not in the "what" but in the "why" and "how."

Let's start with the "why." El GOOG was getting solidly trounced in the social media market. In an industry that is run on statistics, customer data, and demographics; where business wants to know more about their consumers than ever before, Facebook was the data-mining resource do jour.

GOOG knew what people were searching for, and they could target their advertising to the right people, but FB was the new hotness. The new kid in town was getting all the hot press. Facebook was becoming the place to work, not the Google Campus. They even made a fricken' movie about FB. To all intents and purposes, Facebook was king of the hill, and GOOG - for all its profitability - was on its way down.

GOOG launched and then quietly pulled the plug on Wave, Google Video (when it bought Youtube), and at least a few others (YT is too lazy to get a comprehensive list, maybe you can search for them on google). But, I guess that is the point of innovation isn't it? GOOG kept on innovating, trying to find the tools that would make it all-powerful, while FB remained a one trick pony. They made minor interface changes and added a few things and got rid of others, but all the real "development" was happening in the third-party apps - some benevolent, most malevolent - created for it.

Taking the initiative to innovate, and not being afraid of making mistakes, meant that GOOG could work at becoming more than they were.

And GOOG knows how to market G+. They took the same approach they took with GMail. Give out limited numbers of invites to a select group of early innovators, and watch the demand rise. At the start GMail invites were being sold on E-bay for as high as USD200 per invitation. I got mine (free, from a friend) when the E-bay price was at USD50 or so. When G+ invites came out they did the same thing. They created a high-tech club, where you had to know someone on the inside to get past the velvet rope.

Of course there is the other advantage to GOOG of all this. In GMail, as in G+, they tracked the spread of the invitations. You would have to be extremely naïve to think that GOOG didn't have the resources and the algorithms in place to track the spread of the invitations. Keeping track of the social connections between people - even before FB existed - was something GOOG was good at. And despite Facebook's launch in February 2004, it was limited only to Harvard University, and Mark Zuckerberg didn't have or need the ability to track the spread of the - for want of a better word - infection. GOOG had means, motive, and opportunity.

GOOG did the same thing with G+. Although they didn't really need to. The whole purpose of G+ was to keep track of peoples' social connections. If they didn't track the spread of the invitations, I will eat my hatcap; with the badges, hold the salt. The launch also generated enough of a buzz that G+ invitations started appearing on E-bay albeit at prices of less than USD20.

One of the reasons for the buzz is that the newsmedia missed out on the Facebook launch. When FB launched in February 2004, it was just a tiny little spark. No-one thought it would become the conflagration it is today. So when they get the chance of watching a social media revolution from the start, the jumped at the chnce. Also when a behemoth like GOOG announces that it is going to launch the Facebook-killer, the media starts fighting for front-row seats for the clash of the titans.

This is also part of the reason that users are clamouring to get into G+. Almost all of us - unless we were in Harvard in 2004 - missed out on the FB launch. People have a built-in desire to get in on the ground floor. To be seen as trendy or better yet, trend-setting. And with the launch of the "Facebook Killer" there are many people who want to be in on it.

Personally, I think that G+ is definitely the Next Big Thing™ in the social media field. Facebook went from being a social tool to being a marketing tool. People were getting tired of the targeted advertising, and the lack of privacy controls. G+'s solution is more intuitive. With the "Circles" concept as a way of controlling your social circles - taken from the open-source FB alternative Diaspora* - and extremely granular profile privacy settings.

MySpace went from being a social media tool to a way for musicians to market to each other. Facebook went from being a social media platform to being a way for companies to market to people. With the ability to create product pages and other marketing gimmicks FB - at least as far as YT was concerned - was going too far to cater to the marketers.

Of course this is bound to happen with any system. People have to eat, and get paid. But GOOG has a lot more experience in doing their marketing more subtly, as opposed to the heavy-handed methods used by FB. Which gives rise to the question "is ass-rape ok if they use lube and kiss you first?"

Because let us not forget - GOOG is not a search engine company. It is an advertising company. Its main business is figuring out what you want so that they can target their advertisements to you better. G+ is an attempt to not just get this information, but also allay the privacy fears that have plagued FB of late while collecting that same information. In a way what may make G+ work better than FB is that GOOG has a record of not sharing their data with third parties, while FB allows even the most basic app all kinds of access to your data.

I will not lie. I am excited by Google+. I think it has great potential. I am glad that the lessons El GOOG learned from its failures are being used to advance this tech. There are elements from Wave and many other "failed" services here.

But most of all, I am glad that in Google+ we now have an alternative to Facebook. Not just an alternative, but a solid competitor. This has shaken Facebook out of its complacency and even they are fighting to keep their position. Among the people who will benefit from this are us.

And that is not a bad thing.