I’m really enjoying the slap fight that’s warming up between Facebook and Google Plus. I feel a little dirty for saying this but I am looking forward to the full blown fist fight that will hopefully result in Facebook getting knocked down a notch or two. I have nothing against FB, I just like seeing people on easy street getting reminded that sometimes life ain’t so easy. It’s absolutely sick of me.
I know a few MySpace users, a some Twitter users, but most people I know are Facebookers. Duck into any establishment where people gather and within minutes you’ll hear a Facebook user talking about their last experience online as if they were sucked into a foreign country and just returned. No one talks about MySpace. And Twitter, well, not much to talk about there(140 characters).
It started a few weeks back. I checked plus.google.com and it wouldn’t let me setup an account because only small number of people were testing. But the site asked me to enter my email address so they could alert me when the king would allow me to come in. Never heard anything. Forgot about it.
Sometime after that I read a FB post from one of my son’s college friends about having a G+(very cool way to say Google Plus) test account. That stuck in my head until late Wednesday night when I happen to catch the #GooglePlus topic on Twitter. The tweet’s were going crazy because G+ had opened the gates and were letting people sign up. Or so they believed. That turned out to not be entirely true. G+ had opened the gates for those with invitations sent from test account users. Immediately I DM’d my son’s friend and he sent me an invitation. Great guy. But even with an invite, later that evening…er, early the next morning morning I still couldn’t get in. I tried for two days. I openly threatened on Twitter that I was going to give it one more day and then my interest in G+ would be nil. The next morning I logged in.
I’m ok now but I realized I was dancing with the devil. I’ve played around with it but it’s not much fun when you’re virtually alone building a new social empire from scratch. That’ll work out and then we’ll see how G+ pans out.
What’s terribly funny is how Google opened up a new realm this week while FB has touted a couple of new features(video chat and a sidebar of sorts). Big deal. I don’t know if they were trying to distract from the G+ chatter but it was embarrassing to watch. It was like someone offering you twenty acres of land and another offering you a camera and a telephone, and sincerely thinking their gifts would overshadow the other.
I think Facebook might want to study what happened to Blockbuster at the hands of Red Box and Netflix. One minute everything was roses, the next minute they were too far behind to catch up.
And then how many social networking circles do I have to be a part of before I have no real life?
After I Think About It... 