What has Facebook done to fight its direct competitors, Twitter and Google+ ? They definitely aren’t standing still. For instance, they enhanced their share feature. It is not as easy and practical as Google+ however. They have launched a Subscribe option. Basically you can provide a Subscribe button on your profile and let people follow you. That is the Twitter main behavior, for sure. So, instead of making innovations are they replicating their competitors’ best features and concepts? That is at least fair keeping in mind how much Google+ copied from them.
Maybe you haven’t seen the presentation that based Google+. It talks a lot about how we keep subjective groups while we establish relationships. Twitter and Google+ acknowledge a simple and obvious behavior: many relationships are asymmetric. They do acknowledge it since who you follow and who follows you, or who is in your or has you in circles are independent sets. My point is: Google+ still is better. Basically everybody is up to be followed, similar to Twitter, but the “sharers” decide who their shares are going to reach. I guess this is the perfect concept. And 140 characters limit and Twitter lists really suck.
Since Facebook is going to just copy their competitors ideas they could just make their share tool equal to Google+, rip off the “add as friend” and just make everybody follow who they want and let to the user choose what to share with who. In short: Since they are coping Google+ anyway, they could just become it and kill this Google attempt. They have best ecosystem, a good API, pages from organizations, a much larger users base and so on. I hope in the process of becoming Google++ they kill the stupid groups. That features is really lame.
