War erupts on the Social Networking front between tech giants Google and Facebook

Tuesday, 09 August 2011 02:09

Written by Resti Reyes. Jr.

A few weeks ago we wrote about the scandal that spread like wildfire across the internet after it was leaked to the media that Facebook had commissioned a PR agency to mount a demolition job on Google. Very soon after that, we found out why. Google was set to launch a new service that would clash with Facebook head on. It is called Google+ and it is Google’s version of how social networking should be done, “the Google way”.

For the moment, it is officially identified as merely a “project” as opposed to a product – meaning it is still in beta testing stage, in cyber parlance. Subscription to the service is by invitation only, for now – pretty much the same way they rolled out Gmail many years ago. And just as Gmail brought the “Google way of doing things” to emailing, Google+ will similarly revolutionize the social networking game. The advantage of the Johnny-come-lately has always been, learning from the mistakes of your predecessors, and improving on their product.  That’s what Google did to email, and that’s what they are doing to social networking now.

Gmail knocked out Yahoo! email and most other older, earlier email clients, such as Eudora and hotmail, although many people have kept their old Yahoo! and hotmail accounts even as they embraced the superior technology offered by Gmail. For the uninitiated, the single biggest difference, or advantage of Gmail over its predecessors is that it files emails as conversations – keeping the thread of discussion over the same topic no matter how many individual emails are sent as part of that ongoing discussion. You therefore avoid getting redundant entries in your mailbox. Instead, all the responses of the different participants in the discussion are neatly arranged chronologically in front of you – so you can easily trace who said what to whom and when. And when you file them, you don’t have to sort each item into various folders.

Google keeps only one single centralized and chronologically sequenced master database. You access it and classify its contents using tabs – thus you can have the same item filed under different topics (identified by tabs) without duplicating the file. It is infinitely easier to search for anything under this system because you use Google’s famous search technology. Software crawls through all your files looking for keywords. Even if you can’t remember the file name, who sent it, or where you classified it, or when it came in, all you need is to think of a keyword found in that file. And voila! The file is found.

Additionally, every time you email somebody, the address you use is instantly saved in your address book. No need to manually add it. The only downside to Gmail is its limited mailbox size. Yahoo! has retained many of its subscribers by offering an unlimited mailbox size.

Just as Google improved on the email experience by bringing its search technology to bear on the simple and mundane process of everyday emails, they are now bringing that same thinking into what had been until now, the virtual monopoly of Facebook. If you were Mark Zuckerberg, you too would feel threatened.

Lets look at the sequence of events:

1. Google stole the thunder from Facebook when they announced their long-awaited answer to Facebook, Google+, and that it will feature video chat.
2. Facebook also launched online video chat by integrating Skype calling with its online chat client.
3. Google+ has a new feature, "Google Hangouts" that enables online video chatters to host multiple callers at the same time. Skype calls on Facebook are, for now, limited to two people at a time.
4. Google Hangouts allows video chatters to watch YouTube videos together. Facebook-Skype can't do that.
5. Google advises its corporate subscribers to hold off creating company profiles on Google+, saying it is working on a solution for that to come out by the end of the year.
6. Apparently building on the strength of the Google brand name, Google scrapped the names "Picassa" and "Blogger". They will be renamed "Google Photos" and "Google Blogs," respectively. The rumor is that Google will rebrand "Google+" as “GoogleMe” once it is formally launched as a Google product. I would have suggested the name “Google Circles”.

The general observation is that Facebook no longer offers a competitive product, and this became apparent only now because there hasn’t been a competitor to demonstrate why that is, until now. Sure, Facebook beat Friendster and MySpace – the earlier incarnations of social networking, but as an old song goes, “…what have you done for me lately?”

There is one basic systemic problem with Facebook: Facebook assumes you want to share everything with everyone.

This was fine when only your friends were on Facebook, but this isn’t the case anymore, entire families and communities are now on Facebook. And Facebook hasn’t adapted. It doesn’t give you control over some basic things, like who gets to tag you in photos. It can get very irritating when you get tagged by anybody in their photos without your knowledge or permission. What if you didn’t want your old girlfriend in high school to see who your other old girlfriend was in college?

Google, in contrast, understands that people have different sets of friends, relatives and acquaintances. And so they came up with Circles — e.g., Family, Friends, or Acquaintances. That means you can choose who to share your post with. And more important, whom not to.

Of course Facebook is still miles and miles ahead of Google+ in terms of popular patronage. Google+ doesn’t even have subscribers in the millions yet, whereas Facebook is already the third most populous nation on the planet, with over 750 million citizens. It’ll be interesting to see how Google+ develops, but one thing’s for sure: Facebook now has some real competition.

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