After playing second fiddle to Facebook for a year and a half, Google’s “time is now,” says Google’s social VP, citing what he calls the “Like-gate” controversy and a growing distaste for Facebook's advertising practices.

Google VP Bradley Horowitz made his comments in an interview with Wired before a fireside chat on stage at the Ignition conference in New York. Horowitz, who helped lead the creation of the Google+ social network, is spending today talking up Google+ to potential advertisers. In the interview, he repeatedly cited Google+’s approach to business users and advertising as more elegant and effective for advertisers, less intrusive for users, and less awkward and even less condescending than Facebook's approach.

Google’s new blunt public talk about Facebook and its purported flaws comes as Facebook is fighting back against a series of complaints from business owners, celebrities and other advertisers over how it distributes their posts. Google would clearly like to divert some of Facebook’s more than $3 billion in annual ad revenue into ads powered by its own social network, Google+. At the same time, Google’s overt criticism of a competitor highlights that it’s the runner up rather than the leader in social – at least at the moment. And it risks pushback from users who remember that Google, like Facebook, has stirred controversy over its plans to take personal information from social networks and leverage it for profit.

"They’re basically injecting the monetization agenda into the least appropriate moments, when I’m trying to look another human in the eyes."Google is especially keen to highlight that the core of Google+ is ad free. Unlike Facebook, Google+ does not include ads in users’ social streams but instead surfaces them in Google search results, in external ad networks run by Google, and elsewhere in the Google ecosystem. It uses data from Google+ to enhance that advertising, listing user “endorsements” of brands alongside ads for those brands.

Horowitz says such “social annotations” have lifted advertising click-through rates by double-digit percentages. Jeweler Swarovski, for example, was able to grow its clickthrough rate 50 percent; clothier H&M 22 percent; and snacks company Cadbury 17 percent.

Users benefit too, Horowitz says, by not having their most human moments interrupted by “the monetization agenda” of profit-hungry social networks – a group that, in Horowitz’s telling, clearly includes Facebook.

“When I'm having a conversation with my daughter, if a man with a sandwich board came and ran between us and danced around, that's a bad experience,” Horowitz says. “It interrupts my connection to my daughter. And yet that's the way that many of the social networks are monetizing. They're basically injecting the monetization agenda into the least appropriate, least useful, most intimate moments when I'm trying to look another human in the eyes and create a connection of the heart…. We don’t have to do that.”

Facebook declined to comment.

Horowitz alluded to the recent controversies over how Facebook filters posts from business pages as “Like-gate” and implied business users are better off on Google+, where users and business owners can sort one another into “circles” rather than relying on an algorithm – like the one behind Facebook’s News Feed – to determine relevance. Horowitz called approaches like News Feed “patronizing [and] condescending.”

“In the wake of Like-gate and people doing a lot of navel-gazing about what is the value of acquiring a bunch of likes or a bunch of followers on these services, how does it really accrue to the bottom line?" Horowtiz asked. "I think we have some very different answers to those questions.”

“In the real world, there is this thing called context and it's largely based on the laws of physics. When I'm in a room, I know who's in the room. I can look around and I can adjust my vocabulary, my tone, my posture to be contextual and appropriate. For us these rooms are modeled with something we call circles. Now, I think some approaches basically say, 'Don't worry about who's in the room, we'll put people in the room for you. We'll make sure that the right people hear this.' It's sort of a patronizing approach to your communication preferences. We don't think that's what people want..... Our philosophy is not a patronizing, condescending one where we think we know best and we'll decide for each user who will see content or decide for each brand who their content will reach."

Horowitz seems hopeful that publicity, discussion, and changing attitudes around social networks in general and Facebook in particular will bring more users to Google+.

“We launched to a lot of skepticism and I will be the first to admit in the wake of Orkut and Blogger and Buzz and Wave, the world had a right to be skeptical about Google. When we said this was different, people didn't necessarily believe us…. What I think has happened in the intervening year [is] the world has changed a lot. And whereas a year ago, we may have been accused of wanting to be Facebook, it’s clear to the world now that Google would not want that outcome…”

“I think our time is now, and it may warrant us to be more proactive and lean into this a little bit more. But our ethos on the team is … to let the product speak for itself, to continue to ship these great innovations. And on that note, we are not done.”