The tech world loves to pit these two against each other. But for now, they really are on different courses.
It’s easy to call Facebook the social network of the past. It’s harder to build the social network of the future.
To hear Bradley Horowitz tell it, though, Google is well on its way. Google+, he says, lets people share with others in a more natural way than its competitors. Easy privacy controls, an environment free from obtrusive advertising, and highly polished mobile apps combine on Google+ to deliver a next-generation social network, as Horowitz tells it.
“It’s not attempting to chase the social networks of the past,” he said this week at a Business Insider conference in New York, in an assertion that launched a hundred headlines. “We’re charting our own course, and it’s a different course.”
The 15-minute interview with Google’s vice president of product for Google+ showed off a refreshingly pugnacious side of a social network that’s been rather quiet as of late — and, in doing so, got the network its best press coverage in months. (Slagging on Facebook’s increasingly advertising-heavy newsfeed, which no one besides Facebook investors are excited about, can do that for you.) Horowitz went on to suggest that Facebook fails to capture the way people interact in the real world. As a result, he drew renewed attention to the…
Read the full article here: The crazy truth: Google+ can thrive alongside Facebook