You remember Myspace, right? It came after Friendster but was smart enough to take a check from Rupert Murdoch instead of withering away to obscurity and then being sold for peanuts. If you’re a teenage girl in love with customizing as many colors and fonts as possible, you may even have a Myspace account.
Facebook, of course, killed Myspace and News Corp.’s $500 million purchase price along with it. Like every teenage television star that ever existed and claims what has happened to other childhood stars will not happen to them, Facebook has believed it is impervious to the fate of Myspace. Online pundits, who love to gush over anything Google does (we mean you, Wave and Buzz) are thinking it will kill Facebook.
Maybe. Google is slightly less unlikable than Facebook, but their approach to GooglePlus is also darn annoying. If I sign up for Facebook, for example, I can use any email address I want, including my own email address. If people want to find me because of, you know, that Science 2.0 thing, they can search for my @science20 email address. Not GooglePlus – even though I use Gmail as the backend at Science 2.0, it is not a gmail.com address so every invite and every link I have gotten from people who actually know me goes to an email address that can’t sign up for GooglePlus.
Any time you have a brand with almost 300 million hits, someone has poached your name on every email service, so trying to get Science2.0 at gmail didn’t work. Now I can’t use an actual email address and I can’t even use a new email address that is relevant. The barrier to entry is then already too high. With Facebook it was easy, I use any email address I want, people can find me using the email address they know, they didn’t require me to use a Facebook.com email address I will never remember. So I can’t integrate my email and YouTube and all that stuff Google says is in the works because I don’t have a common gmail address for all of those.
Google has a lot of money and a willingness to try new things, that goes without saying, but Facebook isn’t out of it yet as long as Google requires too much effort on the part of users to, you know, make Google richer.
While this sorts itself out, enjoy this funny “The Social Network 2” promo from Oatmeal.com:
