Facebook's plan to beat Google+
Welcome to Internal Tech Emails: internal tech industry emails that surface in public records. đ If you havenât signed up, join 50,000+ others and get the newsletter:
Facebook exec Chris Cox: Hereâs our plan to beat Google+
Circa summer 2010
Abridged History of Google and Facebook
Sometime in the summer of 2007, Larry stopped talking to Mark. This was following an 8 month period in which we launched News Feed, opened registration to everyone, and launched Platform. Almost instantly, we were competing with Google for talent, for developer mindshare, and for tech-blog-cred. They began to worry about their ability to enter new markets with us in the game, and about core investments that werenât doing well and that we were positioned to touch: Checkout, Local, Orkut. They worried about entrenched products that we might one day challenge: Calendar, Picasa, Youtube, Blogger, Reader, News, and about the Comscore data telling them the âsocial networks are bigger than emailâ story. Facebook had the worldâs people, while Google had only their cookies: so we were better positioned even to own Search and Ads one day. Oh my!
So far, we havenât seen the real competition. Open Social, Wave, Latitude, and Buzz were all lobs. By design, they had low chances of breakaway success and lacked depth as fleshed-out social products. They werenât built by Googleâs best people and they werenât coddled and raised by its founders. They were test matches.
Just a reality check... Google has billions of dollars in free cash. They are the most visited, fastest, and most reliable website in the world. They have thousands of talented engineers. The are the worldâs most valuable brand. They are the fastest growing (and best positioned) browser and smartphone OS. They could buy Yelp and Twitter tomorrow. They are now a primary investor in the developer that runs half our platform. Their growth is slowing (revenue and users), and their talent pool has begun to trickle away, so they are hungry. Whether or not you came from Google, we are now being competed with, and this is an opportunity for us to get fired up and respond with product greatness.
Weâve talked a bunch about the upcoming full-featured Facebook replacement. It will unify best-of-breed Google experiences, iGoogle, YouTube, Picasa, Blogger, Reader, Maps, Latitude, under a hood that of a Facebook clone. Once launched, any visitor to Google.com will be upsold into a familiar, personal experience with an opportunity to start over with a clean friends list curated from Gmail contacts. It will be just like Facebook, but more colorful. And it will be directly targeted at our weaknesses. It is staffed by the founders, Bradley Horowitz, and Vic Gundotra, and 150+ of their best engineers. Theyâve organized into subteams: activity streams, profiles, social graph and friends lists, photos, chat, etc. with the explicit goal of doing better than Facebook at each one.
Put yourself in the shoes of the Google. To get traction, theyâll need to build a product and pitch that preys on the angst, fears, and frustrations with Facebook. Privacy and trust issues. That photo you can never upload. Incessant spammy friend requests. Your inability to filter through the 1,000 friends you have to see whatâs happening with your friends or share something with just the people you actually care about. Not getting News Feed stones you like. Not being able to keep up to date with your farm. Chat breaking. Imagine the product that breaks us and the marketing campaign that makes us look foolish. Thatâs what they are trying to build by September.
Pre-Emptive D
To win, we need to respond with a surgical cleanup of structural issues and by launching the products waiting on the runway. The rumor is that they are launching in early October. Its summertime, but we will swallow sadness for every summer going forward if we do not move faster and smarter than the Google for these next 3 months. Here are some of the top weaknesses of ours and the efforts we are coordinating to execute on in the coming months before October 1st:
Social Graph and Audience Problem. The lack of native segmentation and clear social norms around friending has lead to a messy graph and broken product experiences for users with more than a few hundred friends. Many users are connected to too many friends, and poorly organized because of the monolithic nature of friending, the difficulty of organizing friends, poor integration points of friend lists and groups, and the huge amount of friendships that donât represent deep connections. See this presentation for Googleâs take on this. We need to shift the embedded perception that Facebook is full of randos, towards an experience that feels organized around close friends.
Launch Coefficient 2.0
Launch Groups v2
Launch Friend Lists v2
Launch expiring friend requests, softer âIgnoreâ language
Craft short-term tactics for addressing gamer-spam
Consider a âcleanupâ wizard or other aggressive tactics for trimming this down
Spam. Relatedly, one of our most common complaints is that Facebook is spammy. People define this as garbage platform requests, random friend requests, commercial feed stories from Pages, silly feed stories from games, seeing nonsense strangersâ comments on Page wall posts, irrelevant PYMK and PIE results, âI changed my phone numberâ events, and unsatisfying notifications such as the ones you get when a stranger comments after you like a friendâs post. Google will use its reputation for accuracy and precision to frame Google Me as the no-nonsense âgrown upâ community without all the crap. Weâve made headway here in the past 6 months, but we still have work to do in a few areas:
Track and account for negative-experience events holistically and iterate against high-volume poor experiences (SI Team)
Launch graph-cleanup initiatives designed to de-dupe and normalize pages and get real traction here
Implement policy or product changes that will cut down game-generated friend-requests
Stability. Our top complaint from users in our Net Promoter research is that Facebook is buggy. Especially Chat. We need to instrument and fix the high visibility, chronic stability errors:
Chat Stability (e.g. âdisappearing friendâ bug, dropped connections)
Photo Stability (e.g. photostream hangs and photo errors)
Dashboard Slowness, esp. Games/Apps
m.facebook.com.
Photos. Googleâs reportedly identifies this as a big area of weakness in Facebook. Picasaâs landing page now touts their latest feature: people tagging, and their browsing experience is superior to ours right now. We need to make headway on some of the key experiences that separate us in quality of experience.
Launch hi-res photos and photo sets (virtual albums)
Launch inline photo viewer
Fix the photo uploader
Broadly roll out face-detection
Games. You can imagine the conversation that happened around the Zynga investment: Pincus is trying to diversify as quickly as possible; Google can help him while advancing their narrative that they support gaming better than we do. We should expect some iGoogle Frontier-ville widget that itâs every gamerâs face and appealing t
Restore Games dashboard to immediate playability
Restore notification functionality to games developers
Launch story un-collapsing for avid gamers/platformers
New Product Experiences. Itâs been over a year since we launched a truly novel product experience to our users, and we have several on the runway ready to launch in the next several months. We need to make sure we hit our launch schedules and carefully manage the change here so the new experiences are hailed as victories and FBX Profile as a positive launch.
Questions, late-July
Places, mid-Aug
Groups, late-Aug
Titan, Sept
FBX Profile, Sept
Homepage. With a social iGoogle that includes search, part of the battle here becomes being the entry point for the web and one that feels most relevant and customized. We need to make the homepage content more salient and aggressively promote it as the homepage for every user:
Rollout âMake Facebook your homepageâ campaign
Launch app-navigation cleanup and hide unused applications
Launch friend/buddy list integration in Chat
Launch simplified composer w/ better privacy integration, push RHC down to clean it up and make it clearly subordinate to center.
Make notifications and request counts more prominent and intelligible
Trust/Brand. Perhaps our biggest sore spot compared to Google is that users are concerned about their data and about us. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) is at -20 in the united states, down 30 points from April. We will begin to recover this with the fixes above, a handful of good new products, and onsite marketing that dispels some of the most egregious rumors and issues.
âWeâll always be freeâ campaign.
âWe donât sell your dataâ campaign.
âUnderstand your privacyâ campaign.
500 Million launch with âThank youâ stories
Contextual education strategy, esp. for FBX Profile launch
Over the longer term there are still real challenges vs. Google around Mobile integration, Search, and Ads. But if we hit this roadmap we have a good chance of looking cleaner and more interesting than Google at launch. Even if you donât picture all our users migrating over to Google, a bad scenario still is one where we look like the worse product holding everyone captive. These initiatives were presented in the context of many of your 6-month plans, but I want to be crisp and urgent about getting all this done and make sure we are all focused on the bigger picture as weâre underway on the second half of the year.
Letâs talk today about what other things make sense to be focused on and what we need to do to get this done. As [REDACTED] would quote:
âWhoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresher the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted.â - Sun Tsu, The Art of War
Chris
[This document is from FTC v. Meta (2025).]
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg: âspeed and strategyâ (February 14, 2008)
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg: âItâs a really big deal that we ship this photos appâ(September 11, 2011)
Previously: Mark Zuckerberg: The Facebook appâs âcultural relevance is decreasing quicklyâ (April 26, 2022)
If you upgrade to a paid subscription, youâll receive access to the full archive of internal tech emails, with 200+ documents from Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Tesla, and more. Youâll also support our work: every year, we track hundreds of court cases and review more than 10,000 filings to bring you @TechEmails.
YouTube cofounder tries to recruit early employee
From: Jawed Karim
Sent: August 19, 2005 1:22 AM
To: Steve Chen
Subject: Interested?
I am about to send this to Doug. Comments?
Hi Doug,
As you may know, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and I started YouTube.com. So the team is extremely small, and weâre looking for just a couple more people to help us out.
Our growth is going through the roof:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=1y&size=large&compare_sites=&y=r&url=youtube.com#top
We recently got slashdotted, and that has gotten the attention of many other media outlets. We are about to be featured in the LA Times.
What Iâm about to write below is still confidential, but Iâm letting you know because we want to see if youâre interested in joining our team.
We have been talking to Sequoia (Roelof is a partner there now), and theyâve told us in certain terms that they are extremely interested in investing in us. Weâve had two meetings with them thus far, and are meeting with Mike Moritz there next week. Additionally, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and Josh Kopelman (the founder of Half.com) have all expressed interest in investing in YouTube together as an âAngel teamâ. So it seems very likely that we will be raising money from most, if not all of these parties within the next few weeks. Reid has already given us an empty section of 1840 Embarcadero to work in (Reidâs Linkedln is there now), so we effectively have an office already.
Our goal is to use the funding to pursue a two-phased approach. First we will further grow our audience and reach to secure our position as the #1 place for personal videos on the internet. Then we will monetize the audience we have acquired by hosting video ads. There is also an option of offering premium services. And, we think that in the current climate we will likely become an acqusition target in the near future. So there will be many interesting and lucrative options for YouTube.
Since our team is so small, and since we have funded it ourselves thus far, we would be able to offer you a very attractive equity stake in YouTube, should you be interested. Obviously the details of this are time-sensitive, since hiring other people, or raising money, affects the equity positions.
On the technical side, there are many interesting problems. Thereâs the video encoding stuff (we are encoding uploaded movies from all sorts of formats to Flash video), and scalability issues. We implemented a self-replication video cluster architecture which has worked out very well... in fact, we easily withstood the slashdot effect :)
If you want, we can meet with you and provide you with all the details.
Let me know what you think. Thanks,
Jawed
[This document is from Viacom v. YouTube (2010).]
Previously: YouTube cofounder: "video idea" (February 13, 2005)
Previously: Roelof Botha: Would YouTube like to meet with Sequoia? (August 5, 2005)
Previously: Larry Page: âI think we should look into acquiring [YouTube]â (November 8, 2005)
Previously: Eric Schmidt: How much will it cost to acquire YouTube? (February 7, 2006)
Thanks for reading!
-Internal Tech Emails
Sent from my iPad
>> We need to shift the embedded perception that Facebook is full of randos, towards an experience that feels organized around close friends.
2010. Fascinating. They never even came close.