Zuckerberg answers the big question “Is Google+ a threat?”

The BBC aired a one hour profile of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg on Sunday (if you’re in the UK, you can watch it here). All in all, most of you will have heard every detail shared before; aside from perhaps one question, does Mark Zuckerberg really see Google+ as a threat?

The question was met with a wry smile that almost dismissed the question before he’d answered it but thankfully he continued:

“Yeah Google’s a great company and I think we want to look at and learn from everything that they do. But at the same time, people have shared a lot on Facebook and have already told a lot of their life story on Facebook. And we think that we have by far better tools for doing that.”

As far as we’re aware this is the first acknowledgement of Google+’s potential threat, aside from his brief mention of Google’s “little Facebook.”

Zuckerberg will almost certainly be paying attention to Google+ because irrespective of how Google wants to market it, Google+ is a director competitor to Facebook. And with Google continuing to plough resources into Google+, user figures are growing, time on site is growing, features are being added on a weekly basis, and it has a backing of a company with deep pockets of cash and plenty of places to direct traffic to it; the next couple of years could see dramatic changes in the way we communicate.