Fuck Facebook!
I didn't have an AOL account either back ten years ago when that was the hip thing!
Everybody doesn't need to know everything about me.
Shit, I think I still have a couple of warrants out for my arrest in Michigan,
best they can't find me by telling them where I live!

lol funny how this article was published as soon a Google+ has almost gone public.

Also this article is crap because of this statement:

"Basically, if you don't like Facebook, it sounds to me like you don't like your friends."

I get it to a degree.. Obviously I have a number of friends that aren't on facebook, but I think social networking has become such common ground that they are getting left behind a bit. None of it's intentional, but I'll be out with a group of friends and it feels like every time we're out something comes up from someones facebook, and there's always one or two people who need to be brought up to speed. It's like an inside joke, except only a couple people aren't in on it. So to that extent I do get it. I'll also add, managing events through fb makes things really simple!

Have you gotten on Google+ yet? I have to say, I'm not a very big fan yet. To me, I feel like it 100% admits how worried they are about facebook, because it looks like it's been soo closely mimicked. So far I only see a few pieces of unique functionality, and a number of features that haven't caught up yet. But I will admit, I do find it all pretty interesting though, because if anyone could take on facebook, google would be one of them to give them a run for their money!

I don't blame Google for mimicking the already successful layout of Facebook. They could very well be successful because of the lack of annoying apps and broken features. Plus google rarely changes their interface around and if they do it's actually for the better, rather tan some backwards ass design that just makes it look more like what web 2.0 "should look like".

I agree, it's not surprising they copied the layout, but I'm surprised their ego allowed them, lol. I know that's a weird thing to say about such a large company, but google and facebook have been having a little bit of a rivalry ever since microsoft bought into fb. Usually, and especially with a company as large as google, you don't get any changes in the user interface without proven reasons to. This is to the extent of tracking eye movement to place things at the most logical positions and general usability. With that said I'm really surprised they didn't try to improve on it, though some features do maintain an established design of other google apps, so I'm sure they wanted to keep that recognizably.

As far as the apps, I've really got to think thats just a matter of time. I think for the web, more than anyone, google has been pioneering becoming the philosophy of, "we're not the solution, we're the place where you can be the solution", they've done a lot with platform developement, and I believe it's one of the more profitable areas of facebook, especially since most articles point towards banner advertising as a dying revenue stream, lol. Our generation is just trained to ignore those things

But this has always been my strongest argument on why fb would be so hard to kill off... The level of integration it has, so far has never really been seen before. If I buy a phone, car or TV, it seems like that's one of the common options it has built into it. Even if G+ takes off like mad, I think facebook will still stick around with some success just because first, google doesn't have are developer api's (that I know of), and next because once those are around, it'll still be a while before the rest of the internet can change and move over. And even then, it'll be a process. I know at work we have a fb page that gets enough traffic to make most websites jealous. Jumping ship on that to start all over, will be something most places will probably be hesitant to do. lol but it's all going to be interesting, google is definitely one of the companies large enough to do this.

I will say though, I read a really interesting article yesterday that made a note that maybe G+ isn't the fb killer, maybe it's the twitter killer. I'll have to dig for that link, but I read it on G+ posted by I believe it was Kevin Rose who's one of the people I'm "following", lol.

man, that was a long dry post, lol

Facebook was the supposed myspace killer, but myspace is still going strong. Not just for it's initial purpose for proving starting music artists to get their name out but also as a general social networking platform. Sure enough though, only facebook captures everyone's attention and myspace is primarily for bands and people with small attention spans who like to make their profiles glitter and sparkle. (Hence why I left myspace. >.>)

While it may not kill off Facebook, Google+ will definable take the place as the most popular social networking platform after a while.

I think that creates the next question though, if it's not a huge item, do you think google will continue working with it? I kinda look at it like google wave or google buzz. Those had a lot of drive in the very beginning, but if Buzz didn't have a tab in gmail, would people even remember it exists?

I think G+ said they'd hit 10million this weekend, and fb just announced they've broke 750million. I'm really interested to see how the prolonged use of G+ goes with people already saying fb has nearly saturated the market.. I'm definitely up for some competition too. when fb launched their skype integration, they also said they were kicking out a bunch of new features soon, and I've got to think at a minimum, some of this is in response to google.

haha I follow this stuff pretty tight. We use social marketing a TON at work, plus I've got some extra interest just because of how close it parallels to my own work.