Facebook: Welcome to Google+

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Published on Wednesday, 12 October 2011 08:13

Written by Stephanie Venter

Image: Julian NkunaI like Facebook. Having never really known Myspace (who wants to pick their own background ,really?), I’ve always been quite content with Facebook.

It worked for me, its features were pretty cool, all my friends (and later family too) had a profile: the machine worked well.
Enter Google+, stage left. I suppose it’s too much to hope that one social network could reign supreme for too long – look what happened to Myspace – but I would just like to know if Facebook really has to make it as easy for Google+ as they seem to be.
As I’m sure many of you reading this will know, Facebook rolled out some hefty changes recently.
Gone is the focus on status updates, friends’ activities, and apps. Instead the new home page features alarmingly large photos, some weird division between “recent stories” and “top stories since your last visit” and a mini-feed that must be any stalker’s wet dream.
“Introducing Timeline” declares Facebook, allowing users a preview of yet another major change scheduled for the near future. Hang on, didn’t we just go through quite a
drastic change?
People were upset. Users didn’t exactly keep their thoughts to themselves about the new changes, to no avail. And just when we’d all have gotten used to (or have been forced to deal with) these changes, it seems there will be more…
People will get upset and then they will quieten down. However, I do not remember past changes being implemented as often as they seem to these days.
When Google+ came onto the scene a few months ago, no one took them seriously. Gmail is cool, everyone uses Google, but my perception of the Google brand was as a business-orientated search tool rather than as something I’d want in my social life. That was what Facebook was for.
But the reviews started coming in, and they were surprisingly positive. Developers of Google+ seemed to care about users’ privacy (no doubt mainly in observation of the outrage from Facebook users), and after two failed attempts (Google Wave and Google Buzz?) I suppose they had to have learnt something.
I can’t help but view the spate of recent, apparently unilateral changes at Facebook in terms of Google+’s emergence. Is Facebook worried? It seems so. But in trying to become bigger, better, and cooler that Google+, they may see many users jumping ship.
Don’t worry about being more popular than  Google+, Facebook: you already were.