Sometimes things in the web are way simpler than we think they are. You don’t have to be a coding guru or an expert designer to understand why some products succeed and others fail. Most of the time it only takes a fast look at a single page to understand the future of a web product. So after a couple of weeks of using Google+ I can easily tell you why facebook is already dead.

I wake up on a random day and log into facebook. I notice that a girl I met once at a bar, posted a picture with her new haircut on her wall. As a natural consequence three single males and some of her female friends rushed to comment on the new haircut. Despite my initial shock I somehow find the guts to move my eyes further down facebook’s homepage. I find out that someone we went to school with, liked a love song video that a girl posted on her wall. To make things more spicy I get to see that some people made some new connections on facebook and finally that two of my friends attended an event, which I know for sure that they did not attend but rather just clicked “yes” on the invitation.

Having seen all of the above, I inevitably have to ask myself:

1. Who cares ?
2. How will the above information improve my life quality, social relations or at least my web browsing ?
3. Why did I even bother signing up for this crap ?

The right answers are:

1. People who go on the Internet just to pass their time consuming whatever content.
2. It won’t.
3. Because when it started getting popular everyone was doing it. Also because a better alternative did not exist at the time.

But to be fair, there are some people sharing valuable and interesting information on facebook. And there a few of my fiends that I indeed interact and catch up on chat from time to time. So it’s not a complete waste of time. However if there was a filter that would remove all the useless information from facebook the content would drop down to 10%. And this is the reason why facebook does not create such a filter. Facebook doesn’t aim to provide people with valuable information. Facebook simply wants to provide people with any information and keep them consuming it.

But to many people this is just pain. Having to search through a vast ocean of information I don’t care about, means that the effort is not worth it. Whoever takes this effort out of the way will have me hooked on social networking again. And indeed Google+ removed all the junk out of the way and allowed me to focus on what people are sharing. It also gave me an easy way to filter content with circles. Despite the fact that not all of my friends are on Google+, it takes just a week to understand why it’s so much pleasurable to use that I don’t care.

So will facebook be dead tomorrow ? I don’t think so. The vast majority of people will never switch to Google+. Most of us will “have” to rely on facebook for lots of our messaging with the ones that won’t switch. But still the value gained through Google+ and any new social networks that may emerge soon will make facebook less and less important as time passes. Remember when MySpace profiles were filled with band spam and silly backgrounds nobody ever liked ? In a few years facebook just like MySpace, will be just another social network. And to be precise, it will be the old fashioned social network that failed because everyone was on it, but it was more about the distractions than the content itself.

By the way, click the icon bellow to circle me on Google plus:

Update: I just found out an oatmeal comic strip which perfectly illustrates my opinion in a much funnier way:

When you work at a normal day to day job you face some competition. When you work at an office you compete against your co-workers. If everyone else is significantly faster or better than you, then you got yourself a problem. If you have a small shoe store things are even worse. Instead of competing with the ten people in your department, you compete with established businesses more experienced than you, multinationals with millions of dollars and of course all the other businesses of your size.

More than half of small businesses will not survive 4 years in the market. Considering the fact that entering the market requires a significant investment (and possibly a loan) you can easily say that it’s a pretty hostile environment. Becoming a great employee is something that takes guts and lots of hard work, but owning a business is quite a bigger challenge. However some people are driven by competition. What is a hostile environment to one, is a challenging field full of excitements and opportunities to another.

But what if you seek the most challenging work environment available? What if competing with your co-workers or other business owners is just not enough fun. The only place that can offer the maximum level of competition is the internet. When you own an internet based business you don’t just compete with the guy next door. You compete with the best in your field from all over the planet. For some people in their 30s (like me) who were born before the internet, it’s a little hard to conceive.

As we speak, my flagship product (a bookmark manager) is not only competing 50 other similar products but also google bookmarks and delicious. My best competitors are owned by two of the largest web companies with practically infinite resources. At any given moment they can throw in a room some developers far better than I can ever be, and some designers that can make me look like a kid playing with crayons to develop a product to compete with mine.

This level of competition is so high, that it ends up being the most brutal business environment I can think of. Yet for some strange reason, every time I think of it, I smile, make a cold coffee, and get right in my desk.

Google is retiring the blogger and picasa brands in favor of a new new branding strategy. From now on we’ll have “Google Blogs” and “Google Photos”. This is part of an effort to move the company’s direction towards more social oriented products and of course is related to the launch of Google+. A bold move for sure, that makes one wonder how can Google be so certain about it’s success

You see, unfortunately for the first time in human history we don’t know where we are going. And by that I mean that there is no certain path for the future of technology. Some things are certain, like the mobile supremacy in less than five years, but nobody can predict how people will be using the internet next year. Since the first dot com bubble back in 2000 we see every year new products that change the way we interact with computers and people and reshape the way businesses and people work. Game changing products like YouTube, Facebook and twitter pop out so fast that we can’t even tell if there will be demand for something in the next two years.

With all that uncertainty in the air, giants like Google are forced to make irrational decisions that will prove wrong sooner or later. The greater the size of a company, the greater the risk. And the greater the risk for the big players, the greater the opportunity for the small ones. The lesson here is that scanning market demands as fast as possible with the lower cost possible is not a luxury anymore.

The lessons we got from the early revolutionary startups like 37signals are now put into action in the total of the tech economy. Until the web app market of today becomes congested all we can do is develop and release as fast as possible and keep our eyes open for the new leaders.