Los­ing Its Cool – Is Face­book Em­bar­rass­ing It­self To Keep Up With Google Plus?

The most cir­cled Google+ user? Iron­i­cally it’s Face­book founder Mark Zucker­berg with 475,697 followers.

Af­ter Google launched its ser­vice on June 28th, he cre­ated his own pro­file and quickly cov­ered the top spot.

It was a cool move of him. That he cre­ated his own Google+ pro­file ex­u­ber­ated an aura of self-confidence.

‘We’re cool with Google+, we’re not afraid.’

Guess what?

Within days, Facebook’s cool­ness van­ished like morn­ing mist in the rise of a supernova.

Google+ re­ceived rav­ing re­views, and its user base grew faster than any so­cial net­work be­fore. News started to popup that Face­book banned ac­counts and apps who pro­moted Google+ in any way.

Face­book sus­pend­ing ad accounts.

On July 15th, Face­book sus­pended web de­vel­oper Michael Lee Johnson’s ad­ver­tis­ing ac­count be­cause one of his ads pro­moted his Google+ profile.

The ad said: „If you’re lucky enough to have a Google+ ac­count, add Michael Lee John­son, In­ter­net Geek, App De­vel­oper, Tech­no­log­i­cal Virtuoso.”

Face­book said: „Your ac­count has been dis­abled. All of your ad­verts have been stopped.”

Not so cool anymore. 

Get­ting cold feet?

On Au­gust 11th, just hours af­ter Google+ launched its games tab, Face­book an­nounced im­prove­ments to its own games plat­form. One can’t help but won­der if Face­book is start­ing to work hard to stay ahead of Google+.

I’m not say­ing they hadn’t been work­ing on that for a long time, but the tim­ing of the an­nounce­ment is suspicious.

Are they rolling out their fea­tures in a mere re­sponse to what Google+ does?

  1. Face­book didn’t an­nounce their group chat and video call fea­ture un­til af­ter Google+ had beta launched, get­ting great feed­back for their video hangouts.
  2. Shortly af­ter Google an­nounced it will of­fer a cus­tom pro­file type for busi­nesses, Face­book launched its ‘Face­book for Busi­ness’ page.
  3. Then Face­book an­nounced their game im­prove­ments, just a day af­ter Google+ launched its own games.
  4. Well, just read below…

The news to­day, Face­book likes the clar­ity of cir­cles, straight from Facebook’s blog.

Face­book says: “To­day we’re an­nounc­ing a bunch of im­prove­ments that make it eas­ier to share posts, pho­tos, tags and other con­tent with ex­actly the peo­ple you want.

You have told us that „who can see this?” could be clearer across Face­book, so we have made changes to make this more vi­sual and straightforward.”

Face­book should say: “To­day we’re an­nounc­ing a bunch of im­prove­ments that make it eas­ier to share posts, pho­tos, tags and other con­tent with ex­actly the peo­ple you want.

Google+ cir­cles are such a suc­cess; we fi­nally had to make a move. Our users did com­plain in the past, but we didn’t care as much as we do now.”

It’s not only a re­sponse to the tar­geted shar­ing that is pos­si­ble with Google+, it’s also a re­sponse to the fre­quent pri­vacy is­sues, that Google+ ad­dressed bet­ter than Facebook.

What do you think? Google+ banks on the weak­nesses of the old Face­book. Did Face­book need the com­pe­ti­tion to im­prove? Are they afraid now of big bad Google+?