A war is clearly brewing between Google and Facebook for the social network domination and is mainly fought with features and redesigns that are constantly added to their products. A few weeks ago Facebook sported a new layout to visualize photos, very similar to the photo viewer in Google Plus. Only four days ago Google+ had a major design overhaul especially for profiles, where a new cover photo was added behind a bigger profile picture, a layout too much similar to Facebook’s and, even if I’ve always been a big Google fan, the first thing I thought was something like “Seriously, Google? That’s really worth a lawsuit.”
Now it seems that after this Google+’s layout change that increased the size of the profile pictures, Facebook did basically the very same thing. Actually, it’s not a really noticeable change for many out there and I’m pretty sure very few people noticed it. I realized it because my Facebook cover was and still is tailored to the profile picture where I played around a bit to get a seamless, creative image. Now with this change it’s no longer as before and it might seem kind of broken, as you can see here below where I prepared a comparison, because of the bigger size of the profile picture.
So, dear Google and dear Facebook, why do you keep copying each other’s features? Aren’t you able to come up with original ideas? Timeline and hangouts were good ones to me, so please stop copying, you can do better than this. And hire good UI/UX designers/engineers, you can do that as well.