14 DAY TRIAL // While the competition is fierce in the web world, most companies won't trash talk each other unless things get really ugly. In fact, publicly, few even acknowledge competitors and when they do, it's to highlight just how different they are and how they're not really competing.
For a long time, this has been the official tune between Google and Apple, even Google and Facebook.
So it's refreshing to see a top exec at a company clearly saying that they are going head to head with a competitor and that they're going to do their best to overtake them.
In an interview, Google+ VP of Product Bradley Horowitz, part of the two-men team that oversees Google+, talked about Twitter and Facebook, Google+'s main competitors.
"We will compete on features — including simplicity. We are absolutely in a feature race, and I think we will run that race," he said.
This is hardly something new, ever since it launched, Google has said that what we see now in Google+ is only a tiny bit of what the site will be eventually, just the basic building blocks. Indeed, that's what Horowitz reiterated in the interview.
"If I had to say what fraction of Google+ is launched right now, we’ve just got the very basic foundation in place. Profiles, circle editor and stream, that’s sort of the minimum viable set of features that you need to start doing interesting things," he said.
Recently, there have been some reports about Google+'s traffic numbers. Of course, all of those reports came from outside estimates and Horowitz was quick to dismiss them with a very eloquent argument, most of what happens on Google+ is private, the "dark matter" as he called it.
Because of the solid privacy options and limited sharing capabilities built into Google+, many people just share with their circles, not with the outside world. In fact, Google claims that two thirds of the activity is not public.