"Just UI polish" is a hilarious way of stating this. It's not just the UI that needs to change, more importantly it's the UX. It's disappointing if they are willing to ignore the importance of something like this. It's not just a "lick of paint" that's needed. They need to rework the whole concept and this is time-consuming and difficult to do right.
The super embarrassing thing for Facebook is that Google already told them what they were going to do. Take a look at this slideshow by Google's UX team a whole year ago [1]. That's right it's Circles!
Google has really done their homework on what makes a social network work and Facebook has no excuse for executing their own version of Circles so poorly with Groups and Lists. They've wasted valuable time pandering to advertisers when it was blatantly obvious what was coming. Google's vision wasn't secret.
Even more ironic, the guy who did that study was later hired by Facebook.
I honestly think Zuck either figured that a) Google was incompetent/unwilling to challenge them or b) Google be damned, Facebook will make much more money with the public-by-default, privacy-optional approach to sharing.
Perhaps the blindsiding was the promotion of Page to CEO and subsequent mobilization of Google's developer army?
Zuckerberg is also a kid, he's like a rookie who hit a home run on his first at-bat. It would not be surprising to me if he was blindsided out of a combination of youthful arrogance and inexperience.
Because there's only Mr Zuckerberg running the whole company?
He's been at it a while. If he gets beaten I don't think it will be to do with youth and inexperience. Remember Google failed with their first offering in this space (Wave), was it youth and inexperience then?
Wave wasn't really designed to be a social experience. During the keynote, they talked about what Email would be like if it were designed using today's technology, rather than evolving from snail mail. What they came up with was a lot of very impressive technology. They gave this technology to the developers in beta to see what they could do with it. While Wave was scrapped, bits and pieces of it live on everywhere from Docs and Calendar to Google +.
The super embarrassing thing for Facebook is that Google already told them what they were going to do. Take a look at this slideshow by Google's UX team a whole year ago [1]. That's right it's Circles!
Google has really done their homework on what makes a social network work and Facebook has no excuse for executing their own version of Circles so poorly with Groups and Lists. They've wasted valuable time pandering to advertisers when it was blatantly obvious what was coming. Google's vision wasn't secret.
[1] http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ...