So what’s missing in Google+ ? There are 3 features FB still has that Google+ does not. These are:

• Pages
• Games
• Groups

Pages

I do not see Google+ working feverishly to build their “Pages” killer feature, they already have Blogger and already have one of the biggest index of public pages around which is directly searchable. They’ve got this area quite well covered. They just need to lasso these features and work a bit on the integration part a bit. [Addendum] They also have Sites

Games

In most social games, what makes it lucrative is the micro-payment system. Google already has a micro payment system called “One Pass“. That should be enough for game developers to latch on to the micro-payment eco-system. Platform? I think Google will try to capitalize on their Chrome platform’s Web Store. This may be another browser war brewing if they push the apps exclusively on the Chrome’s platform. Either way, game developers are more “free” to capitalise on a more open framework. I expect developers to be able to write games outside of the Web Store and still be beneficial to Google by using their micro-payment system.

Groups

If you ask me what will I miss the most from FB, I will say Groups or Closed Groups. This was essentially their original version of exclusive circles but only er.. exclusive. This is where I think I can hear a group of people slaving over the keyboard to produce a feature called “Bubbles“. That’s what I’m calling it for now anyway. Essentially, it’s an exclusive members only circle with no intersecting parts hence a “Bubble“.

Trailerpark Bubbles - Not Google's eh!

[Addendum] Oh heck – they have Groups already but I still maintain Bubbles are more fun and a natural extension to Circles.

Google’s bag of tricks are endless! This is probably why they are re-strategising with “More wood behind fewer arrows“. To focus on few(er) better cohesive product base.

Take for example, Buzz. It’s not really a product but more a feature of Gmail, it is placed within the Gmail  menu system and does not exist at the top menu nor does it exist in the (don’t get me started) “more” menu. Yet it’s not really just a feature because it is a social tool which is much more than Twitter and a little bit of Facebook(ish) – in terms of FB’s “wall” concept. I can also tie feeds in from various social sites – which is great! It means I don’t have to be forced to put all my data in one pseudo cloud (i.e. Facebook) and keep my pictures in Flickr or other supported media sites. It didn’t really take off because it was “misplaced”. Hidden in a sub menu as a feature within their product. I don’t have data to support this but I’m going to throw a guess that most Gmail users don’t really click on the Buzz feature.

Welcome Google Plus (G+). The product is shoved right to the top left of the Google menu system. Even the menu system received an overhaul to make it look more “aggressive”. The main feature of G+ is the “Stream” feature. Which is like “FB” wall, only different in subtle ways. It has a feedback comment system on every dribble I want to put up and point for point, it has everything Buzz has and more but here is where we hear the lone stridulation of a cricket. I can’t connect Buzz to my Stream.

I do hope they can see “my view”. Buzz is like an aggregator – the mechanism is there to pull data in from the Splinternet – all Google now has to do is to have Buzz output become a Stream input – and et voila the desert lives again from the bountiful buzzing stream (ok too pun heavy).

[EDIT] – This JUST in Google closing down a major part of Google Labs. Say it isn’t so! The wild innovation is morphing into (yawn) product management. I thought that Google could leave the boring stuff to us and be one of the guiding lights that lead us where no one has gone before. Pass me a kleenex.

So how do I liberate my data?

Under Facebook (FB),  it’s under the Account Settings option called “Download Your Information”.

Under Google+ Settings, there is a tab labeled “Data Liberation”.

The Bees Knees - Download your data!

Differences

FB download forces you to download the whole archive – if you have a lot of data with FB, pressing this button means a very, very, VERY long wait. You may be staring at this page for literally, hours. In fact, I created this experiment using a very quiet dormant FB account and it still took a long time to process. (2 hour plus on, it was still in Pending status).

The user experience imposed on me while doing this was that of “regret”. The back-end processing must be delegated to the bottom of the priority list – and I couldn’t help feel that it made me feel sorry for even clicking the button.

Google’s experience is very different. It started off with the pretext that the data is yours and it makes no apology or warning that you are downloading your private data. On top of that, Google allows you to selectively pick what you would like to download. The option ranges from:

• Download your PicasaWeb photo albums (ZIP)
• Download your Profile data (JSON format)
• Download your Stream data – (Wall postings for you FB tongued people) (ZIP)
• Download your Buzz (ZIP)
• Download your Circles and Contacts (ZIP)

This would provide a smaller volume to download but could still be further improved if it had a “date range” option; which would immediately allow me to do a year end archive or backup of my data. Anyway, clicking on any of the above will bring you to a Google service called “Google Takeout”.

Google takeout allows you to package your “takeout” and observe it’s progress.

Comparing this to my FB account, this is heaven! I pick the data I would like to retrieve, it does some back end processing and proceeds to deliver the data to the Checkout page, to be downloaded. The Google experience probably had 5 or 6 clicks more to work through than the FB experience but the final result was effective.

Conclusion

At this point, I can report that the Stream data are stored in individual HTML files and are very much in tact. The photo albums downloaded as well are very much intact and viewable without any special tools. I will have to come back and add to this article while I wait for the FB process to finish.

FB Delivered

When I woke up this morning – I checked my e-mail and saw that my FB archive is now done and ready to download. Even when you are logged in to FB and clicked on a “secure link” it will still ask you for your password.

On my dormant account it was rounded of as ZERO kb – on my active account it had roughly 50Mb of ZIPped data in it.

After extracting it, you have a simple top  level directory with a single HTML file which you open with your browser to access all your FB personal data. All the relevant bits are here.

The functionality is all there – it’s just that the experience could be raised from the pits to a pleasant enough state. The data after all is ours.

What’s Missing?

Both experience left me thinking that retrieving data is a binary event. You either want ALL or NOTHING. To me, if my data grew to a sizeable volume, I would probably like to narrow it down by some filters. The easiest filter to implement would be date ranges. It would allow me to download pictures from 1st September 2009 to 1st November 2010 when I was working on a particular project for example. It would be nice rather than downloading a large amount of data and causing the back-end process to be stressed out when all the user wants is a few needles in a haystack.

Patenting a design should be a documentation exercise of a design or a concept and not an application of exclusive right of use. I am against patents but I am not against brand protection or trade marks. I believe patents kill innovation and by allowing patents to be enforced, this leads to a self-perpetuating quagmired state of court cases fighting wasteful arguments such as “first to file or first to invent“.

I see innovation akin to the process of evolution. It is diverse and progressive in nature and has no fixed path. Eventually, efficient designs will be derived from generations of trial and error or natural selection. The diversity of designs also means that convergent evolution exists where by just using the process of evolution, different design paths converge (before evolving in it’s independent path based on application/evironment challenges).

Evolution is also very evident in the scientific method in which an ongoing cycle of experiments will have their results documented in order to reach a desired effect. Along it’s way, many of these results may spur tangential research paths.

The global world must move away from patents – as it serves no other means apart from protecting financial interests where greater needs exists to allow a healthy environment for open innovation.

About five years or six years ago, I told my friend, with some smugness, that in a few years time, there can only be one maximum of two major social sites such as Facebook (FB) or Friendster that can co-exist. These super-nova social sites will have such large mass and gravitational pull that no other social sites can achieve critical mass in it’s presence. In hindsight, I should have published a paper and got more out of it than a few hours of debate in a pub. At one point I almost believed that OpenSocial could make the social world “open” again.

Here we are, in the social Internet of the future and we have a super galaxy called FB with about 700M stars – and the rest of the universe which is governed by laws of Google to link these disparate and distant mini stars together but it could not penetrate the FB super galaxy.

Google is launching it’s latest product to try and create a mass big enough to start drawing solar systems from the Facebook’s super galaxy. I’m sure you’ve heard of Google+ (G+) (https://plus.google.com)

The success of Google+ is dependent on a few factors

• Facebook
• Facebook and
• Facebook

My first look at G+ seem to give me a false impression that it might win with GMail virility alone.  The last census showed GMail to have about 150M users and Facebook is taking the toast home with nearly 700M. This is actually the first time I looked at it and saw “David and Goliath” in this massive scale with Google as little David.

There are two anchors in place for Facebook;

A “Swiss Army Knife” Without Common Packaging.

The self-sustained-closed eco-system is  the main challenge of pulling people across to G+. Google has never failed to amaze us with services such as Search, Translate, GMail. Provided accessible desktop tools such as SketchUp and Picasa and even gave the world the revolutionary Android platform.

We’ve experienced the Google age, I would say thousands of people could owe their  degree, PhD or promotion or even recommendation from the Google augmentation of their “real” intelligence. But it is also looking like the IBM of the 21st century – a company run by engineers – actually, independent engineers.

However, Google has let us down on a few promises, Wave, Buzz, Chat and if anyone remembers GFail – with all the computing power, these little utilities felt like a feeble attempt at best with no real push for commercial gloss. The services never felt “integrated” enough. These killer apps never turned out to be a cohesive A bomb – it felt too academic at some point and the laurels of AdSense was probably getting quite comfortable.

From “Do No Evil” To “Man The Guns”

I have no insights into Google’s strategy but do (somewhat) understand it’s history and it’s vision. I see that with the commerce that is growing within the large Facebook closed eco-system, Facebook’s gravity must be pulling some revenue out of the public web sphere (particularly the AdSense revenue source) and with the introduction of Facebook email; the air-tight box is growing tentacles out to push the FB use case boundaries from a simple closed social media website to a complete end-to-end solution for a user (while still being trapped in a FB walled garden).

FB is not an open system at all, it only appears open because it has a large enough community. Google’s search engine is not even allowed to crawl beyond Facebook’s public profile page, everything else is member’s only – this is data contributed from a community of about 700 million people.

Google has to make G+ it’s harpoon to hunt down the FB whale but I’m definitely not liking the direction FB is pushing the community to. The Internet is an open eco-system – Facebook is a completely closed system – it is already starting to block out the sun with it’s one huge silo’d cloud.

This will be interesting – and I’m certainly watching it closely.

Here are my anecdotes;

• Apple is a company run by a dictator designer
• IBM is a company run by engineers
• Sun was a company run by engineers
• Oracle is a company run by lawyers
• Microsoft was run by Bill Gates and is now slightly confused

Both Facebook and Google are both (IMHO) engineering based companies but they differ greatly:

• Facebook is autocratic – when it comes to openness, it’s Tupperware.
•  Google is democratic – when it comes to selling products – it’s Woodstock.

Where will we be a year from now? We currently have FB in the lead, LinkedIn just gaining serious traction and G+ coming out with guns blazing. If FB were to react to G+, will it also take on LinkedIn? Will FB attack G+’s line or will it try to strengthen it’s walls (and further close the society in).

P/S. LinkedIn – I feel this is the “other” successful social site and it’s niche is that it doesn’t deal with teens and nanas but purely a community of professionals. Technically, FB could focus on similar use cases with a focused demographics and the right tools and could potentially threaten LinkedIn head-on but that’s for a separate discussion.