–Steve Tengler is Altia’s User Experience Director. This post is part of a series where he reviews Google’s new social network, “Google Plus”. This is the fourth and final installment.Click here for part 1, part 2, or part 3—
One of the Olympic Twins Knew It
In the movie, there’s a debate amongst the three Harvard students about when to sue Zuckerberg since they supposedly approached Mark with their intellectual property as a request to code their brainstormed website. As delineated in multiple scenes, one of the Winklevoss twins (sarcastically referred to as “Winklevi”) wanted to shutdown The Facebook immediately since the early bird gets the worm, and the greater momentum attained by the earlier website, the harder it would be to overcome. Eventually, during deposition proceedings, Zuckerberg’s character states, “If they had invented Facebook … well, they would’ve invented Facebook.” Those scenes were all I could imagine while examining Google+ — they didn’t invent Facebook, and their 10 million users are a far cry from 750 million users who, according to Facebook’s site, spend 700 billion combined minutes per month on Facebook. The momentum created by Facebook is real, so real that the French government has recently banned their hyperlinks from French websites to give other start-ups a chance. (Author’s note — Obviously the French didn’t go to Harvard!) According to Facebook, 50% of all users log-in in a given day with a third of the users having a Facebook app on their mobile device. Moving that inertia shall be a Herculean effort for Google – and anyone else who attempts to reinvent this social networking wheel.