When Google+ appeared I made the switch from Facebook. My reasons were not the usual crap about privacy and games polluting my stream but were more practical: I am very lazy and like to have unified services. But the more I use it the more doubts I have:
- The API: OK, the Facebook didn’t have one in the beginning either but that’s not an excuse. I want to have apps in G+ that enhance the experience. The first one that comes in mind is Flixter app by Flixter. I want to be able to post and rate movies to my circles and get recommendations from them. Apparently Google doesn’t understand that in 2011 APIs are a must for any social service that want’s to survive.
- SPAM. Oh yeah the spam issue. I see a lot of articles about poor innocent users having their accounts suspended for being plain idiots but in real life I don’t see it. I have submitted tens of spam reports to G+ team and the accounts are still alive and kicking. And the problem has a simple fix. The issue is not the spammers, because whatever you do they will never go away. The BIG problem is G+ helping them. G+ has a feature that acts like a bug that allows anyone in 3 clicks to spam hundreds of users. It goes like this.
- You first add a few high-profile users
- Than you go to the circles tab, and find people
- On there, go to more actions, select all and add all the people to a circle
- Repeat the procedure a few times and suddenly you have thousands of users in a spam circle
- Profit
- Incoming section. Ok, basically Twitter functions the same way: any user can add anyone without reciprocating (Facebook requires a 2 way connection). But Twitter has done it better and I don’t think that is rocket science to reverse engineer it:
- Mass add is suspicious behavior on Twitter and might get your account suspended. You can’t add more than 2000 followers unless a significant percentage of them follow you back
- Twitter doesn’t annoy you on their frontpage with spam from those that have added you
And one last thing: I had expected Google to pull the big guns on Facebook and this be a quick war. Apparently until now Facebook plays catch very well and more than that pushes forward giving Google a great competitor.