Early adopters given the chance to check out Google’s new social networking product Google+ were generally enthusiastic, but here are three smart folks throwing cold water on big G’s latest effort to capture some of Facebook’s momentum.
Robert Scoble says Google+ will be an amazing tool for his Silicon Valley geek community, but that it’s unlikely to gain mainstream adoption since it’s just too complicated:
Google+ is for the passionate users of tech. If you just want to sit back and have the system do all the work (which means it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough for most people) then Facebook is gonna be where you stay, especially since your friends are gonna lock you in for quite some time.
On Quora, where the most interesting discussion about big tech launches seems to happen these days, former Facebook engineer Yishan Wong posits that Google+ doesn’t grasp the way privacy works within social group discussions, and that that will be its undoing:
On Google+, strangers consider it perfectly normal to insert themselves into a conversation between you and your friends any time you make a public post… what Google doesn’t understand is that privacy is not about protecting secrets, it is about knowing when your participation in a conversation is appropriate.
Arik Beremzon agrees with Scoble that Google+ is too complex for mainstream adoption, but focuses on the broader privacy issue around personal data:
The people who shout that they are going to delete their [Facebook] accounts because they want to have fort knox level privacy controls are not the majority of users… G+ makes you think and that’s why it will never ever dominate or compete with Facebook. It’s not necessarily a UI issue, it’s not a programming problem, it’s a conceptual issue that will ruin the user experience for the casual user.
It will be interesting to see how Google+ is received by the mainstream when it opens up fully for the public. Maybe Google is listening and at that point it won’t be the same product that these skeptics reviewed.
Covestor models that are long Google as of 7/1/11:
- Flexible Value from Dan Beckerman
- Eagle Portfolio from Green Valley Wealth
- Long Term Growth from RYNN
- Large Cap Core Equity from ASB Capital
- Management Access from Doug Estadt
- Fortune 100 from Philip Dhingra
- Performance with Protection from Leif Eriksen
- Suncoast Equity from Suncoast Equity
- Large Cap Growth from AlphaMark Advisors
Sources:
“Why yo momma won’t use Google+ (and why that thrills me to no end)” Robert Scoble, 7/1/11 http://scobleizer.com/2011/07/01/why-yo-momma-wont-use-google-and-why-that-thrills-me-to-no-end/
“How Google+ shows that Google still doesn’t understand social” Yishan Wong, Quora, 7/3/11 http://www.quora.com/Yishan-Wong/How-Google+-Shows-That-Google-Still-Doesnt-Understand-Social
“Why I disagree with Yishan Wong and what’s really wrong with Google+” Arik Beremzon, Quora, 7/3/11 http://www.quora.com/Arik-Beremzon/Why-I-disagree-with-Yishan-Wong-and-whats-really-wrong-with-Google+
