Google+ And the Future of Facebook and Twitter

Google+ is the ultimate social network for heavy gmail users.  If you are a gmail user, then having your social network drop down right from the top and let you interact is a huge plus.  I would expect most heavy gmail users to strongly consider dropping Twitter and Facebook, since this gives you better tools, faster access, and a more solid experience and allows you to jettison keeping up with two sites.  I would expect this also will be a strong motivation if you are a user who wants web-only apps, and is not a heavy user of third-party apps or aggregators.

But it is apparent that Google+ is a lot more than just the social network.  In fact, I would argue that with Google+, the concept of the "social network" as a business model is close to extinction for Facebook and Twitter.  This is because the facebook and twitter ecosystems have a fundamental weakness.  Third party-development of apps for facebook and twitter do not include things like Google Docs or any of the many apps in the Google Apps store.  While facebook is strong in the games area, I would not expect that to be a sustainable beachhead against Google+.

Google+ finally gives some "social"-style organization to Google profiles of people you are interested in.  As opposed to the contacts you managed for your email or your google voice.  Integration with this is not yet there.  But for users of the Google "OS", when it gets there, this is going to be more compelling.  Obviously right now it doesn't have the "corporate" features of Facebook or twitter where identity is a lot more malleable.  But it's on the near horizon already.

Google Picasa/Photos/whatever is going to get a huge boost from Google+, as people seem to be posting a LOT of photos on Google+ - and posting them and managing them is much faster and easier than on Facebook (and certainly a lot easier than twitter, since it's in one integrated place, not a third-party service like twitpic).

Adding in the nascent Google Music and as-yet unlinked Google Docs and Google Reader, and we are starting to a see a very mature new model for an "operating system" which is web-native.  Not a pretend-faux-desktop, but an operating system which supports the fundamental operations which people want to perform.  It's very goal-oriented: find, organize, create, share, collaborate, communicate.

In many ways, the existing desktop OSes are too general-purpose.  There will always be a place for traditional OSes, but we are already seeing them commoditized and disappearing to the point of nearly irrelevance.  This new web-version is completely app-centric.

Facebook doesn't have enough components to really provide that.  And its messaging is pretty paltry compared to the richness of Google Mail/Google Voice/Google Chat, which can only get more integrated in the future.  I find it hard to see Facebook being able to move on the apps or messaging.

Twitter's simplicity can help it survive, but for conversations (invented by Twitter users, not Twitter, Inc. - using the @ sign to reply to people), Google+ is already superior.  Google+ doesn't yet have hashtags or trending (which is hard to imagine being far off the radar), but it does already appear to have good user suggestions.

Google has also expressed an interest in federated social networks, but it will be hard to see what networks will be worth federating with if facebook can't keep up in the apps area.

On the extreme flip side, for non-gmail users, the system is not nearly as compelling.  It will be very interesting to see what happens to the user population.  Will the gmail users have enough momentum to convert users to Google+?  If gmail offers more tools to make it easier for people, it's certainly possible.  People have trouble with gmail's relatively simple "label" system - it will be a challenge to see if gmail can become more enticing.  Google will need to make it easier for Google accounts which are non-gmail to work and also need to improve their search (which is already dominant) to make Google+ more compelling to potential new Google+ users.

If Google+ can make inroads with non-gmail users, I expect we're going to see a rapid decline for Twitter and a less rapid, yet inevitable decline for Facebook.  Interestingly, this development from Google appears to be the result of a concerted inhouse process, as opposed to things they have purchased in the past like YouTube or Picasa, and obviously they've bet a lot on this.  If it pans out, I think they've hit on a sweet spot and are going to be unbelievably successful.

My C# Generic Singleton Base Class

public class SingletonBase<T> where T : class
{
    static SingletonBase()
    {
    }

    public static readonly T Instance =
        typeof(T).InvokeMember(typeof(T).Name,
                                BindingFlags.CreateInstance |
                                BindingFlags.Instance |
                                BindingFlags.Public |
                                BindingFlags.NonPublic,
                                null, null, null) as T;
}

Adam Machanic's Grouped String Concatenation Challenge Results Posted

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/adam_machanic/archive/2009/05/31/grouped-string-concatenation-the-winner-is.aspx

I came 9th. Looking forward to the next challenge.

New Celko article on constraints on Simple Talk!

http://www.simple-talk.com/content/article.aspx?article=589

Everything old is new again - deja vu - new boss same as the old boss, etc.

http://aws.amazon.com/windows/

Mainframe pricing for Windows!

Stupid Human Management Tricks - Part 1

When management loses the respect of employees, it is almost impossible for it to be regained. Many of the stupid human management tricks tend to lead directly to a loss of trust.

Lying to Employees

I think this is the biggest one. Now there are always exceptions and special cases and whatever, but employees are pretty smart (I guess that's another list about management, but back to the lying...).

When you contemplate telling employees a lie, you should start from the assumption that they will eventually find out the truth.

There are certain categories of lies which I guess should be addressed:

Lies of Exaggeration: Employers will very consistently exaggerate the position of the company in many ways. They will exaggerate the quality of the work environment, the financial stability of the company, the level of sales. Often, they will do this publicly to the stock market and could eventually face criminal or civil proceedings. I would group all of these sins of exaggeration together as innocent lies which sometimes get out of control and turn into real big problems. When it comes to employees, they will usually forgive these, because they understand marketing and the lies that come with it.

Lies of Subterfuge: Employers often have strategic or tactical goals and they would like to keep employees in the dark. Usually, this is a particularly stupid management trick, since your employees are the only people that can actually cause your company to achieve your vision, but this would seem to be the #1 case where employers justifying lying in their heads. It rears its ugly head specifically when an employer plans something like an office move or outsourcing. If employees get whiff of a location change or outsourcing, they will panic and abandon ship. If management is not actually good at getting the new location or outsourcing online, they will have done damage which far outweighs the cost savings because:

1. Human capital is expensive because it is valuable (you were outsourcing something expensive in the first place, right?)
2. You can always get human capital cheaper on an hourly rate, but management never fails to factor in costs of training and the costs of experience loss. Gosh, it's so hard to figure these out, and apparently so hard that it's better to simply risk the enterprise than figure out a worst case scenario and do risk mitigation.
3. If you treat people like a commodity, you will get a commodity. So all the brilliant out-of-box solutions they came up with aren't valued, they can take them elsewhere. Maybe you'll get some brilliant offshore people with great ideas, but eventually, won't they get expensive or you'll be outbid for them, too?

Employees will never forgive lies of subterfuge. In fact, it will cause them to be more and more suspicious and they will find plots where there is only either incompetence or brilliant plans.

In fact, all employer plans they don't agree with or immediately understand come down to 3 possibilities in their minds, and none are good for your company:

1. Conspiracy: In this case, you are a sack of shit and they will figure it out and go elsewhere. But that was the point anyway. Of course, it doesn't bode well for your company, since anyone who doesn't leave doesn't trust you anyway.
2. Incompetence: In this case, you are not only not smarter than the majority of your employees, they know it, and they don't respect you because of it.
3. Brilliance: A plan so brilliant they don't understand it; in this case, you have employees who are probably not up to the task of carrying out your plans with success.

Your final problem is that option 3 is so stunningly rare and unlikely that it does really point to one of the fundamental problems of forging a team: The team needs to be (on balance) as smart as you are and able to absorb the vision and respect it on its own merits.

semicolon.net is alive again

After many years, I'm reviving the semicolon.net domain for blogging about software development issues.

Some upcoming posts I am planning will discuss stupid human management tricks and the nature of production.