Motherboard

“Emerald Sea” is the name of this 1878 painting by Albert Bierstadt and the code name of Google’s latest.

Remember Friendster? It is probably still around on the Internet somewhere, I’m guessing probably at friendster.com. When that came around, it was the first time a “social media” site really grabbed public attention and gained enough traction to be usable. Shortly after that a little guy called MySpace showed up and blew it out of the water. Around the time that Tom the MySpace guy was having his day in the sun, before selling out to Rupert Murdoch, a little thing called TheFacebook.com was starting to spread across a few college campuses. At some point it got the Facebook.com domain and became the biggest website in the world ever. The question that has been on my mind as of late is this: how long, if ever, until Facebook loses it’s current monopoly on the American social media?

Well Facebook has way more traction than any of its previous rivals for sure—a user base in the hundreds of millions, businesses targeting million-dollar marketing campaigns on pages and apps, and a movie about it that for some reason won some Oscars. On the reverse side of that coin, we have the camp of people who are completely anti-Zuckerberg for myriad reasons, largely over the privacy concerns that have dogged Facebook for years.

A comparison (see larger here).

Enter Google, a company notorious for taking a good idea (Mapquest, Hotmail, Zoho) and kicking it to perfection until it’s firmly implanted in the zeitgeist (Google Maps, Gmail, GDocs) or the producer of awkward silences (Buzz, Orkut). It’s also a company with $30 billion in yearly revenue (Facebook only brings in a few billion). It can do whatever it wants, but it’s also got a lot at stake. What is the search engine giant doing taking on the annoying upstart? That’s like asking why Google, like any self-respecting Internet company, has a vice president of social. Wired’s Steven Levy asked Vic Gundotra, who holds that particular position at Google, if he thought that Plus was a “bet-the-company project.” He replied: "I don’t know how you can look at it any other way.”

It might just work. I don’t want to sound like I want a Larry and Sergey tattoo or anything, but this is one time when I can see where they are going. And I like it.

Google+ has a ways to go before it will really be a contender, but we know that this is just the beginning. For one thing, something like Facebook’s app platform is a piece that is completely non-present in Google’s public beta – at least for now. There have been murmurs at least of a developer API coming soon for G+. But will this be as open and integrated as Facebook’s developer platform has become, especially since it has recently taken up a charge dubbed Operation: Developer Love (which is great, because they needed it), or will it be relegated to a simple API?

Google+ will really need to embrace and run with this part of the game if it wants to stay competitive on the business side of things, as that has gained increasing importance among businesses of all sizes. We do know as well that the network will integrate business functionality too, and it’s even asking people not to create business profiles yet, because those are coming soon too. And by Jobs, there’s no way people will move to Google Pluslandia in droves without access to Farmville.

Now for the elephant in the room. Privacy concerns have shadowed Zuckerberg from the very start. Even now, amazingly, Facebook demands constant scrutinized for its ever-increasingly-difficult-to-use privacy controls, which make it very hard to figure out who can see what when or how. New features get rolled out with undesired privacy settings, and before you know it your mom has seen those pictures of you with the giant [redacted] [also redacted] you had in college.

Right out of the box, one of my personal favorite features of G+ was the privacy controls. You can simply look at your profile, click the different parts of the page, and decide how visible you want them to be. And with the Circles system, it is super easy to whitelist the people you really want to poke (or whatever the equivalent is — they’re isn’t one yet!) and blacklist certain people from certain content of yours. I like having the ability to type in anyone’s email address (or none) and see what my profile looks like to them. I can keep my stuff completely locked down or wide open if I want, although Google might be changing that soon. (Some Facebook engineers, eager to show that their product isn’t square, have built a “Circle Hack” for Facebook’s “friend groups.”)

Lastly, the user experience. Google definitely has had ups and downs with it’s UX design, but something has shifted in recent years. In fact the last few weeks have brought vast improvements to both Google calendar and Gmail that have been met with great acclaim from some in the design community. I think this is where the big G’s upper hand is strongest against its competitors. For one, the system itself is very easy to use, at least once you get used to the cute names like “Circles” and “Hangouts.” And once you sign up, you quickly realize how nice it is to have a direct link to your G+ account across all of your Google apps. I wouldn’t check my Facebook page nearly as often if it weren’t for the fact that I get emails about it. But having the toolbar directly integrated into my email/calendar clients is like cutting out another step. I definitely dig that.

Overall, it seems to me that people will continue to embrace Google’s product catalog, steadily growing the user base for Google+, turning the social network into something of a normal extension of our online presence. And that is really the ultimate goal: if you can at least get the laziest, dumbest users on the entire Internet to interact with it regularly, then you might have a chance to compete with Facebook. And who knows? Maybe, hopefully, we the users might benefit in some way.