Does 'Google Plus' imply a 'Facebook Minus'?

Some quick (and dirty!) calculations!

Google+ was publicly launched on 28th June 2011. It started off with limited invites, and today (close to 2 weeks after the launch), almost everyone has one. Thus this is a right time to do some analysis as enough people have given Google+ a whirl by now.

Now then, Google's Market cap has jumped from 155.68 Billion USD (on 27th June 2011) to 171.54 Billion USD (on 8th July 2011). That's a rise of 10.19%, or 15.86 Billion USD in 8 trading days! However, the NASDAQ Computer Index has also risen by 7.25% in the same period. Google has a Beta of 0.61 against the NASDAQ Computer Index (on the basis of past two months data). Thus, purely using this statistic, the rise in the Google stock price attributable to the changes in the US Computer Technology industry as a whole is 4.42%. Since, no other major news has come from Google (apart from Google Plus) in the last couple of weeks, we can (as a ballpark estimate, and yes this is the 'dirty' part) attribute the rest of the increase (5.76% or ~9 Billion USD) to the perceived increase in value created by Google Plus!

9 Billion USD is HUGE! That's - well - a tad more than an entire Twitter![Twitter is valued at USD 8 billion going by the latest 400 million USD round it has raised] Facebook's latest valuation as per the last auction held by SharesPost (which happened to be on 7th July 2011) was 87.5 Billion USD. This value has remained flat as against the auction previous to this - which was on 23rd June 2011.

Now, the value created by Google Plus for the Google shareholders is not out of thin air - it is at the cost of other social networks (which effectively means Facebook). So shouldn't we see an equivalent (close to 9 Billion USD) drop in Facebook's valuation? [Assuming it's a zero sum game we should - unless we are seeing significantly new and previously unexplored possibilities with Google Plus.]

However, even Facebook has had an 'awesome' feature launch in the past week - the Video Chat service, which happened on 6th July 2011 (just one day before the bidding for the latest SharesPost auction). So effectively one can say that the value added by this feature has sort of balanced out the value snatched away by Google+. But it's difficult to believe that one single feature can do so much damage control!

It would be interesting to track how the Google stock behaves over the next few weeks, as more and more people try out Google+ (and thus the value created by it becomes more clear). Very curious to see how exactly the Facebook stock fares in the next private stock auctions (and how much of a 'minus' is Google Plus for Facebook!)