Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg: A little bit of poo just came out

Google+   

Google+, Googleplus, whatever you want to call it, is a phenomenon. No other Google app has reached 10 million users two weeks.

What's the draw then?

Up until now we've had Facebook. And nothing else. Facebook has grown because it has done the 'social graph' thing better than anyone else, more focussed than anyone else (I mean MySpace turned into a freakin' music store!) and more reliably than anyone else (cough cough Friendster).

Facebook had us all locked in and now Google+ is giving us a vent for a frustration we never knew we had.

What makes Facebook so damned good is the fact it puts Social first. The interactions between people, the conversations, the sharing, the contextual discussions, the ways it has pushed the semantic web down everybody's throats so we now have a standard way for websites to self-describe.

This Social focus hasn't been lost as new features came along. Adding photos is all about tagging and discussing, unlike Flickr where it's all about the photos and the social aspect is bolted on. The Graph API, newly opened out since mid-2010, is all about making it easy to build simple applications that keep people connected.

Google Wave did that too didn't it? Why did that die?

Google Wave was a piece of brilliance from the geeky brethren who brought you Google Maps. Allowing for realtime chat and sharing it looked like the next big thing, but it fell over on one critical aspect of its design:

It was document-centric, not people centric.

People is the most important thing to the success of any business or venture. Once you crack how to keep the 'people' happy, (staff, customers, suppliers) then the rest just works.

OK, OK, that's simplifying it a bit. There is a critical mass of happiness that must be achieved before your business can perpetuate itself. Lord knows that Facebook has achieved that, and as long as it doesn't piss anyone off too badly about their privacy then it should continue, despite Google's efforts.

Unless...

Well, this could also go horribly wrong for Facebook. Google+ is obviously people-centric (although inexplicably I find I'm a little more detached than with Facbeook) but once you start giving people the option of bringing Google Docs into '+', then you have a platform for doing business. It is going to become Google Wave but the journey there will be totally different.

Google also has the opportunity to turn this into a way of doubling their already healthy revenues (just this week, Google announced quarterly revenues in excess of $9bn - the first quarter results since Larry Page took over as CEO) - all their cash comes from advertising on sites and on search results. With Google+ they can also add advertising to Social. Just like Facebook do. If you think about the information Google has about you - your search habits, your purchasing patterns etc through search - add to that you freely giving them all your most personal details and friends information etc, then these adverts can be the most targeted ever.

By changing your status to "looking to buy a new car", Google can map your previous searching history to an advert that will make you stop and think, "that is perfect, where's my wallet...?".

And lo and behold, Google has kept it's customers (Google+ users) and suppliers (advertisers) happy, that's 2/3rds of the success pie.

What about the Google staff?

This year, Larry Page said that the bonuses of Google staff would be based around the success of their Social Network.

I think that success pie is looking mighty full right about now...