This is a really interesting relationship triangle happening at the moment.

On the one hand, you have Apple, a "traditional" hardware/software company, whose aim is to move as many devices out the door (IIRC, hardware is their primary revenue source with the largest margins). They do this by making awesomely polished software that they lock to their devices.

On another hand, you have Google and Facebook, which are information companies. Their primary goal is the collection and organization of data. Google does this through many fields (but for the sake of this discussion, I'll focus primarily on Android and Google+). Facebook does it through "social."

What I find interesting first is the announcement that Apple chose Twitter for iOS 5. From the post on betanews (http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Why-did-Apple-choo...), Apple chose twitter because it wants information to flow freely between its devices (facilitating their ultimate goal of selling more devices).

But more so, Apple is now in a position to really hurt Facebook since Google+ came along. Since Google's goal is the free flow of information, we are continuing to see iOS Google apps, despite the popularity of Android and the seemingly competitive nature of Android vs. iPhone/iPad. But Apple benefits from Facebook's demise and Google+'s openness, and Google benefits from this because they continue to collect more information. Facebook loses in this case since they locked themselves into a corner that they can't get out of anymore. I think this was a well played strategic alliance on the part of Google and Apple.

I have to agree with all of this. Only thing I would comment is that I envision g+ becoming end user's social aggregator if you will. By that: End user wants to post information to his social networks so he hops into g+ and decides where to funnel this information. Perhaps in the future g+ will have facebook,twitter, linkedin etc, accounts and thus you have g+ a one stop shop for social networking which rests upon some of its own infrastructure but mainly pushes and pulls data from other sources. We already know google is good with managing and processing boat loads of data and social data is data like any other.

/my two cents

The only thing I do not understand is how Apple can lock users to iTunes for their media management, it seems analogous in more ways than not to Microsoft's IE issues a handful of years ago. (Perhaps I am missing a key point here, if so please comment.)

Wouldn't be surprised if they got an iPad app out before Facebook.

I would be surprised, actually. Their Android tablet app is absolutely terrible (I think it's the same as the phone app, which is what makes it terrible). I hope they do put out tablet apps, and soon, but given that they could have launched a decent Android tablet app and chose not to makes it seem like they're delaying tablets for a while.

I could be wrong, though. I'd love to be wrong.

The google+ iphone app is very well done. I have heard third hand that google spends a lot of time writing low level interaction code (re-writing swipe gestures to be 20% faster, etc...) solely for cocoa. I am not sure of the truth of that, but this app is much better put together than most and really shines as a new release. The other google iphone app also has some really unique and thoughtful features (the help immediately comes to mind).

I wouldn't be surprised if they came out with an ipad app soon and that it was at worst, decent.

Normally Android apps (the 'properly' written ones) use the same code base across tablets and phones. Most of the layout is done as xml, with different xml files loaded based on the size of the screen, resolution, etc.

That being said I checked out the Google+ app on my Xoom and it does not appear that they included proper tablet configurations yet.

Yep. I'm aware that you're supposed to scale with size nicely in order to make an app work nicely on all screen sizes. But there should be more than that. My Xoom's camera is far better than my desktop's webcam, but the app lacks the Hangout feature - the only part of Google+ that's really magical for me.

So the 10" tablet app has a layout designed for a 3" screen, ignores the incredible hardware capabilities of the device (two video cameras! no video chat?), notifications that pop up after I've seen them twice already, etc.

It's just no good at the moment, but I'm sure it will improve with time.

Hangouts still arent available for Google+ mobile. I they make it available soon, Hangouts is really an awesome feature.

I don't know if this is a big deal. I've also downloaded it, but have had no reason to even open it yet. I still doubt G+'s ability to make a significant impact.

Duncan Stewart's retweet of Andy Levy's comment says it best: "as far as I can tell, every post on Google+ is either something I already saw on Twitter or something about Google+."

With that said, I think there is value. I'm more than happy to tell Google who my friends are, if it helps them refine my searches.

> I still doubt G+'s ability to make a significant impact.

That's a mistake. I think it's pretty clear that Google+ is already a successful product that's making an impact, but let's pretend for a second that it isn't.

When Chrome launched, it had very little market share for a very long time. However, as it slowly grew, the obvious statement to make was that as other browsers saw it coming they quickened their pace and sped up their JavaScript engines, hastened release cycles, etc. Even if Chrome never did attain much market share (it did) it would have been seen by Google as a huge success very quickly: if all other browsers are faster that's still a win for Google.

So, even if Google+ never gets significant market share (too late, within weeks it has millions of users), it already has made an impact by providing intense competition for Facebook.

Google even launched video chats before Facebook did, showing very clearly that in some places (new features) they are already changing the landscape of social networking.

They already have made a significant impact. And the game is just starting.

I don't know what Google's aim is with Google+. If they're not aiming to replace one of the current social networks, then yeah sure, they can succeed.

Chrome was a completely different beast, and I suppose the best way to differentiate is on brand relevance vs brand preference. IE and FF were still browsers. No one said "go internet explorer" - but people do say "Oh yeah, go Facebook me" or "yeah Facebook that kay?" When I think of sharing something online, I think Facebook or Twitter, and not "social network".

Yes, Google has a large market share in a small amount of time. What are their usage details? I still haven't seen anything on G+ that hasn't been on my FB feed, or been tweeted first. Also, unlike Chrome, I don't feel G+ offers any drastically different features.

Ok, this is speculation. But this is all speculation. I guess we just need to wait.

"I don't use it. None of my friends use it so it's not popular and won't be successful."

Ah, I really dislike this mentality.

Ever heard of "Everybody Loves Raymond"? It's a TV show that I didn't and none of my friends watched. But guess what? it was the most-watched show in the early 2000s.

How about "Arrested Development"? I watched it. My friends were watching it. Some of my friends still talk about it on Facebook. But guess what? It got canceled because of poor ratings.

What I learned is that in some aspects, I'm not part of the mainstream. My guess is a lot of people in Hacker News aren't either.

Let us not make conclusions on something based on what we or our friends use or like.

"Duncan Stewart's retweet of"...

I am honestly curious -- why wouldn't you just say "Andy Levy said it best"? Is there some onus of attribution regarding retweets? (Not snarky -- seriously curious. My personal opinion is that you blog about or retweet or share something because you think it's notable, deserving no attribution unless you've actually added something interesting to it)

Twitter celebrities will have a natural aversion to any medium that essentially puts them at ground zero, and they're going to look for reasons not to like it. For the overwhelming majority of ordinary people, however, it does fill a need. The first-class nature of circles and the privacy controls have completely changed social networks for me, making intermixing classes of relationships much more relaxing.

My fault. I actually not familiar with Andy Levy, and I felt DS's opinion mattered more on the issue, considering his area of expertise.

That's actually a legitimate reason to cite retweets. Huh.

I still do not see the app on the app store. Is it regional launch?

I searched "Google Plus", saw nothing, then just "Google" and it was the top result, if that helps.

I don't see it either.

I'm sure Facebook is beginning to worry.

I am genuinely confused about your comment. Are you being sarcastic? In the future, you may want to add some more commentary that would make your comment interesting and/or valuable to the members here. HN is a great site because the people here offer thoughtful commentary.

I wasn't being sarcastic. I was simply saying that I bet Facebook is beginning to worry about some serious competition.

What's really great about HN (now I'm being sarcastic), is people who will nitpick at tiny things you say, and then reinforce their pedantics with "This is what makes HN great" or "HN isn't about this". I was just making a simple comment. Is that now allowed on HN?

No one's saying that simple comments aren't allowed, but I'm not sure that your simple comment contributes much to the conversation. Maybe if you explained why you thought that you think that Facebook is beginning to worry about serious competition, you wouldn't get a reply asking what you meant by your otherwise simple comment.

When someone nitpicks at a tiny element of a larger post, that's pedantic. When all you posted was something tiny, however, you're inviting further inquiry by being unspecific and vague.

The low karma he would supposedly get from simple comments should be feedback enough.

pg, the site founder, observed once that longer rather than shorter comments tend to be valued by other participants here (as judged by comment karma scores). The subset of HN participants who read my comments appear to share this opinion, as my longer comments do tend to gain more karma than my shorter comments.

To explain to you the specific reaction to your one-sentance comment (great-grandparent here, immediately below the submitted article link), I really couldn't tell for sure if you were being ironic or meant the literal meaning of the sentence you posted. A longer comment usually makes that of issue more clear, which is important in a medium where we are not speaking face-to-face and seeing each other's body language or hearing tone of voice.

There's something beautiful about how it can be read both ways.

big up to Joe Hewitt - his method of notifications appearing at the bottom of a screen with a badge on it, and being kept in one place in the app he developed for the facebook iphone app has been borrowed by foursquare and now Google, it seems.

Yeah, I know that it's fully expected to have reduced functionality during a beta, but it's getting annoying that I can't use Netflix, HBOGo, or G+.

I was contemplating installing the latest beta on my iPad, but this comment is convincing me to hold off. Thanks.

That's why it's beta.

Not to be overly harsh, but I'm honestly amazed that small teams can turn out great iOS software but a company with the talent and resources of Google gives us an app like this?

I know that they plan to improve it, etc. but I have to wonder what it would look like if you gave Tapbots three months and access to the G+ API...