Can Facebook Be Overthrown By Google+ ?

Right now it doesn't seem as if Google+ or any such website can even remotely threaten the might of Facebook. But it does seem that a whole lot of people are seeing Google+ to be a Facebook Killer, if not now, at least in the future. Google+ API is not going to be made available for a few months, so there is not going to be a lot of functionality on the site right now. Still there are a lot of people faithfully using their Google+ accounts just because it is something that has been put out by Google, and because it has a single feature (privacy) that is very different from Facebook!

 

Facebook took 2-3 years to snatch the #1 spot from MySpace. So I think given some time, Google+ can seriously challenge Facebook and give it a hard time! If I'm not wrong, Google is not in any hurry to make their site a success overnight. They seem to be taking each step very carefully and this seems to be working too! Facebook has recently updated its look again! This can certainly be only due to the "plus" effect! Who knows what is going to take place next. What do you people think; can Facebook go down to Google+ in the near future?

it will take sometime and alot of effort to catchup to Facebook's domination in Social Network... but i think Google can, anyone can if the right options and approach are taken... but for the time being and more years to come, i think Facebook will reign supreme

I really think Google + will overtake Facebook as Google has alot to offer should be really interesting tbf I personally am going to make the switch to Google + has I find it a lot better to have everything in one ie I use google chrome, Google, YouTube and many other Google products.

I think both Facebook and Google+ are fine websites, but it is really up to the users to decide which of the sites they want to be on. It is as explained in the movie The Social Network: People are only going to use these sites because their friends are on them! So even if a few people like Google+ over Facebook,they won't really use it unless they are sure that all of their friends will come over to Google+ as well! Facebook was not an early player by any means, but benefited by the mistakes made by the competition, and has now become #1. But Google can't hope that Facebook will make any mistakes,at least not immediately! So maybe, while Google+ is certainly a good alternative to Facebook with better features, it will definitely take a lot of time before it will overtake Facebook. All that remains to be seen is how Google manages to win over the millions of users required to start a trend for people to use Google+ over Facebook!

As an old orkut user i know how worst it is to rely on google for the social profiles. Not just orkut but blogger blogs are also not reliable. Spam trigger in your orkut community could cause losing blogger blogs and other google services. I dont know why we are comparing google plus with facebook. Both are different. Google plus is basically sheep-herd stuff and it looks more like twitter. I have given invite to my friends and all they reacted - i'm happy with facebook, this seems twitter like stuff to me and it's boring and has less privacy. Privacy as in no private profile feature and all the data being available under search engine, which is not the case with facebook and orkut. After 2-3 months of launch many people are coming back to facebook in fact, as google plus is horribly boring. It is good for marketers to slap ads and links reddit style on their readers and followers. But as user, you have not much benefit. There are no forums or groups like orkut or facebook. Oh please, don't say there are hangout. Try convincing people on mobile or USB or dialup internet about hangout and how it could work out for them. lol. it's uselss without text based communication like we do here in forum. Forum features are cool and should be there but google plus being marketing or reddit style+twitter style platform will be complicated if they add forums to it. Besides that they'll not be able to handle spam. One more important point, they want real name and public profile, which is not good for privacy. Facebook is keeping users only based on privacy and private profiles features. Start giving that to google plus users and you'll get more users. But google can't do that because they want more public data for ad manipulation. In case of privacy, You can have fake name and private profile on orkut and facebook but not on google plus. Trust factor on G is getting low these days by consumers. Google plus also lacks PM or messages feature. But considering they have message or wall feature to individual and circle method, this feature can be bypassed for PM and messages. But still it's note easy to eat stuff for users. All this fanboy stuff aside, what's in it for us (individuals). It all depends on needs. Facebook having more features covering larger userbase and as long as they're offering that service, they're in it. Just my 2 cents.

You've raised some really good points there starscream.....however, G+ really needs to be given a chance.

 

First off, what you said about Orkut is completely true. But, Orkut wasn't entirely a Google creation. It was merely acquired by Google, and then G tried to tinker with it, and things went wrong. The original designing and features were not Google's plan. Perhaps that is why after a while, users started shunning Orkut - the base itself was unstable, so no matter how much Google tried to improve it, the whole site was going nowhere.

 

I'm not saying that Google is some sort of perfect company that is always bound to bring out perfect products. Google does make a lot of mistakes (remember Wave???) but when the company puts some time into creating a product, there usually is something good within it! In the case of Wave, there were one or two good things about it, but not many. In the case of Google+, there are quite a few good points available and this is what makes it more promising.

 

Google+ is a product developed entirely by Google from the ground up, and as such I'm sure there are quite a few plans for it in the near future. Of course it can never hope to catch up with Facebook anytime soon, but there does seem to be some kind of promise in the future.

 

As you said, there are not basic things like PM and groups available, and hangout is being promoted heavily but it is useless in most countries where the Internet connection is very slow. Well, Google has always concentrated on the US market first and that is why it is promoting the hangout feature heavily, since it does work out in the US quite well.

 

The Google+ API will come out in a few months and after that things might get a little more interesting. If the present situation continues, with Facebook making new changes to its interface and Google+ doing hardly anything at all, then there might not be much to talk about, since nothing will change - Facebook will still be #1 and Google+ will continue to be a shiny new toy that no one likes to play with!

 

I still maintain that if Google takes the right steps, then there is a chance, no matter how slight, that Facebook can be overthrown by Google+ Now we just need to sit back and see what happens!

Orkut was re-written shortly after when they acquired from the developer- orkut. It is not on old codebase anymore. Orkut's one of the team member is indian and is in bangalore. You can check his name "sandip patil"(i don't remember exactly it was sandip or something) profile for that. He'll tell you the big change they did in the entire codebase during 2007 update. They added a lot of community and other privacy features during this update and moved the orkut to asp interface way back in early 2007. I still remember that because he commented that on one of the MS programmers wall who i friended during my involvement in c++ community. If you check old images of orkut communities and profiles you'll understand the difference. Old interface was php based and new interface is ASP+Flash based. New improvements which are made that looks like facebook are more slow as it uses flash. Their mobile interface was quick as it was in ajax+asp which always works for small apps, not on desktop by the way. I agree they do create some worst products or sometimes even make good products into bad one. For example, notebook closed, wave closed and google fonts interface made horrible thinking it as user friendly. Fail one more. That's not the point though, as innovation has it's limit sometimes. My point is what's in it for us ? Think about it. You have public profile and google being search engine company will make your information public. Many females and govt. officers don't want such information out on search engine. That aside, even commercial project workers dont want open access to profiles. For that reason they're sticking with facebook. Google argues with us saying that circle is the best option for privacy and you can have privacy that way. But then again, public profile and private circle hardly makes sense. Especially for women as they expect real name and picture on g+ as account TOS. So my point is , if you as a user, find it useful over facebook or any other social network ? For what ? What feature is there that you dont find anywhere else ? For me there is no such feature. Google even tempts users to join google+ by claiming it has SEO advantage, but even that claim failed as nobody seen any difference in 3 months or so. As for hangout working for US users, i have yet to come across any fan of hangout. Most of the hangout fans are either into social media, blogging or some other public relation stuff or news site -who want more traffic for their brand and are interested in slapping their personality or brand on readers. G+ is hyped because of media and nothing else. To be honest this one sided reddit style train wreck communication turned me off with google+. I mean think like this(explaining it in my case), your friends are not on google plus as there is no privacy and everything is open and searchable. Media is tempting you with Google+ features which are no different than previous one released by others. Then some celeb or blogger or social media person likes G+ and rest of the followers follow them. I may appear less consumerist or skeptical to you, but i'm tired of information overload and Google+ has plenty of noise than signal. That is what keeps me away from it. Facebook keeps me in check with people and also stops me from boredom because i can find friends easily and control them from adding me and even showing me in list of available friends and view of search engine users. If someone comes up with more privacy than FB, i'll not hesitate to go to that route. It's all about signal vs noise. I'm not teenager to think like - 1 million folks eat at mcdonalds so it must be healthy. I'm past that age now and i can see the hype trends with popularity. Anyway, sorry for the rant.

google+ is still young at age, but knowing that there's alot of google product users, especially with Gmail and Google Search etc. they will gain their share of fans and users... still it's a lot of catchup to the current 700+ million Facebook users

@starscream: You do make a good argument. I didn't know that Orkut was radically re-designed. That was interesting. In that case it does make sense that Google should be blamed for Orkut's decline! They did have a good amount of control on the designing model of the site and so they were the ones who made it successful or a failure. In any case, the days of Orkut are over and now there is no point in discussing about it any further.Coming back to Google+, I'm writing this post just after deleting my profile Why did I do that? I joined in the fist place because a friend invited me. I thought it might be fun to check out, and the circles feature was admittedly good. But the rest of my friends refused to give priority to Google+ over Facebook! That's quite natural. Then again, these were the same friends who refused to move from Orkut to Facebook when I invited them! So the website itself has something wrong for not making it exciting enough for users to join. Facebook had a lot of angles for making users shift from Orkut to Facebook. In my circle's case, it was Farmville! My friends saw me and a few others playing for a while, and they joined just to start playing. Slowly they saw the other features that Facebook offered and decided to stay.Such a thing doesn't seem to be happening in the case of Google+, nor is there any chance of it happening at least till the end of this year (the API might give rise to some apps, but their success is questionable). Since there's nothing more left for me in the site, I quit. What about the others....the millions of people who have joined Google+ in the initial phases? My guess is that they're either too bored to participate, too lazy to delete their accounts, or they've just stopped caring! They do not seem to bother that their profile is still public even if they're not using it. Well I was the one who started this thread and asked whether Google+ will overthrow Facebook, and I ended up deleting my own profile I guess I got my answer then!!@manuleka: Google+ has to catch up a lot! It hasn't even gotten to 100 million yet.....although its user base in slowly increasing, the activity over there is admittedly decreasing. There seem to be fewer and fewer people staying active on the site and a lot of these people are scared of deleting their Google+ account because they feel they will lose their Gmail account too (which is not true!) Some reports are suggesting that the decline in activity will continue until Google introduces something new in the website for users to interact with, so that they will not end up getting too bored on the site.

One of the first things that I did when I turned 18 was register for Google+, which brings me to my point: Google+ is restricted to those over 18. Now I'm sure you can say that people can lie about their age and stuff, but if you already have an existing Google account with your real birthday, you click on Me+ or whatever the link says, and it brings you to a notice saying that the site is age restricted.

 

Looking at the 2011 Facebook demographics (citation 1), we can see that 20%-30% of Facebook users are between ages 13 and 19, inclusive. 20%-30% of "more than 750 million active users" (citation 2) is about 188 million people, more than double the active population on G+ I believe. By restricting the age to 18+, they are already losing a significant portion of the target audience.

 

Furthermore, paraphrasing from above and elsewhere, people shift from social networks socially. Currently, I have like three friends on G+ who aren't really active on the site. On Facebook I have approximately 400 "friends", not sure how many are active. And since most of my friends on Facebook are either the same age or younger than me, G+ really isn't an option for them, and there has to be something really amazing to attract users in addition to better privacy controls.

 

As much as some people dislike Facebook, it's the right option for me right now.

 

Sources:

1) Verde, Amodiovalerio, http://www.slideshare.net/amover/facebook-demographics-2011, slide 18

2) Facebook, http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/_=_

Google+ and orkut will never beat facebook, I'm a big fan of facebook & i can connect with all of my friends, i can share, post, comments, chat even in mobile.

My experience with google+ : At first look, its looks same as facebook. but i have slow internet connection and its takes more time to load. 2ndly my no single friend now using google+ so i can't use. google+ is not available for low version of mobile.

google+ circle is also very confusing and page not loading properly in opera and firefox. but facebook is supported by every browser.

You know Facebook giving free access with many of mobile telecom company. I have a Airtel connection, n i can use free facebook by going http://0.facebook.com/error/?err=zc&std&refsrc=http%3A%2F%2F0.facebook.com%2F&_rdr .

Facebook is best in pages, we can follow any company like twitter. but no one like to subscribe through google+.

conclusion : google+ is a company og google, so people want to try, but trust me no one is happy with google+ , we all know about orkut, orkut was popular till 2010, but now maximum people left orkut because facebook is best. and in our busy life we can assess facebook from anywhere like computer, mobile smartphone, USSD based gsm plateform (need no internet).

Google+ and orkut will never beat facebook, I'm a big fan of facebook & i can connect with all of my friends, i can share, post, comments, chat even in mobile.
My experience with google+ : At first look, its looks same as facebook. but i have slow internet connection and its takes more time to load. 2ndly my no single friend now using google+ so i can't use. google+ is not available for low version of mobile.

google+ circle is also very confusing and page not loading properly in opera and firefox. but facebook is supported by every browser.

You know Facebook giving free access with many of mobile telecom company. I have a Airtel connection, n i can use free facebook by going http://0.facebook.com/error/?err=zc&std&refsrc=http%3A%2F%2F0.facebook.com%2F&_rdr .

Facebook is best in pages, we can follow any company like twitter. but no one like to subscribe through google+.

conclusion : google+ is a company og google, so people want to try, but trust me no one is happy with google+ , we all know about orkut, orkut was popular till 2010, but now maximum people left orkut because facebook is best. and in our busy life we can assess facebook from anywhere like computer, mobile smartphone, USSD based gsm plateform (need no internet).

that's a very premature conclusion, considering google+ is a hatch-ling tool, give it time and it will slowly gain popularity... i think google+ will gain its' share of users, considering there's a great number of gmail customers...

with simplicity of the gmail email interface and layout... i'm sure google applies the same to it's social network system google+... facebook is dominating social network for sure for now!

Fanbois are already there in case of google+. All you can see in their posting is rant against facebook, twitter and microsoft. I mean most of those social media people who are on google+ are either ranting against microsoft praising apple or blaming facebook. So it is totally boring already because of these people. As for subscribing to them, i unfollowed them when i found out about them. Take example of guy kawasaki, robert scoble and chris pirilio. These guys are in the first when it comes to google+ ranting fest. As for google+ features, google copied twitter and facebook and tried to come up with something on their own. Twitter last week changed it's layout and now looks exactly like google+. I mean in terms of follow, image and video view and similar features. There are few features going to be there in future like google+ from twitter but have to wait and see how that goes.As for privacy and other stuff, it's not premature to say how they'll perform. They did wrong with orkut and other security stuff on any of their web apps. They have SMS based anti-captcha but bots even passed through it and now are making things easy for spamming. The reason i'm not g+ is same. Once it is open for flaws, it'll be taken over by spammers just like orkut. Some people may not like this if they're google fanbis but that's the way it is. It's also hard to trust google when it comes to privacy especially when they're rolling out features spy on friends share of links or +1s.

Fanbois are already there in case of google+. All you can see in their posting is rant against facebook, twitter and microsoft. I mean most of those social media people who are on google+ are either ranting against microsoft praising apple or blaming facebook. So it is totally boring already because of these people. As for subscribing to them, i unfollowed them when i found out about them. Take example of guy kawasaki, robert scoble and chris pirilio. These guys are in the first when it comes to google+ ranting fest.
As for google+ features, google copied twitter and facebook and tried to come up with something on their own. Twitter last week changed it's layout and now looks exactly like google+. I mean in terms of follow, image and video view and similar features. There are few features going to be there in future like google+ from twitter but have to wait and see how that goes.

As for privacy and other stuff, it's not premature to say how they'll perform. They did wrong with orkut and other security stuff on any of their web apps. They have SMS based anti-captcha but bots even passed through it and now are making things easy for spamming. The reason i'm not g+ is same. Once it is open for flaws, it'll be taken over by spammers just like orkut. Some people may not like this if they're google fanbis but that's the way it is. It's also hard to trust google when it comes to privacy especially when they're rolling out features spy on friends share of links or +1s.

interesting experience starscream, i will certainly tryout google+ and see if it's any good for me