Google Plus Failures
Google doesn’t get social: Google Plus‘ failures are plenty – but calling them dead? http://eicker.at/GooglePlusFailures
Google Plus: Adoption, Identities, Business (Pages, Direct Connect), Search (Bias), API
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Gerrit Eicker
Gerrit Eicker 09:18 on 10. November 2011 Permalink |
Slate: “Google+ Is Dead – The search behemoth might not realize it yet, but its chance to compete with Facebook has come and gone. – [A] social network isn’t a product; it’s a place. Like a bar or a club, a social network needs a critical mass of people to be successful-the more people it attracts, the more people it attracts. Google couldn’t have possibly built every one of Facebook’s features into its new service when it launched, but to make up for its deficits, it ought to have let users experiment more freely with the site. That freewheeling attitude is precisely how Twitter – the only other social network to successfully take on Facebook in the last few years – got so big. When Twitter users invented ways to reply to one another or echo other people’s tweets, the service didn’t stop them – it embraced and extended their creativity. This attitude marked Twitter as a place whose hosts appreciated its users, and that attitude-and all the fun people were having-pushed people to stick with the site despite its many flaws (Twitter’s frequent downtime, for example). Google+, by contrast, never managed to translate its initial surge into lasting enthusiasm. And for that reason, it’s surely doomed.”
Scoble: “I wish I had never heard of Google+’s brand pages – The problem is that there’s no editorial tools for anything posted to our Google+ account. Google+ brand accounts are woefully inadequate for public companies’ needs. … Yes, Facebook didn’t have those features for its brand pages at first either but then when Facebook first came on the scene no one thought they would use it for business. Heck, when I first heard about Facebook it was still for college students only. … Did anyone really think these things through? Why did they take five months to get done? – Anyway, this is just a way for me to tell anyone thinking of signing up their company for a Google+ brand account to think twice. You might, because you signed your company up for such a thing, get saddled with an entirely new job that you might not like one bit. One that you’ll find that Google didn’t equip you for success in.”
Ruble: “I have decided not to post here for the time being. I will leave my profile up. Google+ is great. I wish them luck. Really i do. But I have to make choices about where I spend my time and for me that’s Twitter, Facebook and soon Tumblr – where I will be doing more so. It’s where I get the most value for the time invested. So, adios for now. See you on one of those networks. I may change my mind one day, but right now this is my plan. See you online.”
GigaOM: “[T]he problem with many of these criticisms – as with Manjoo’s premature obituary writing – isn’t just that social networks take time to evolve, and users need time to find out what they are useful for and what they aren’t useful for (Twitter is a perfect example of that, since its own creators didn’t really know what it was for when they built it). The problem is that they are seeing Google+ as JASN: just another social network. … But Google has made it clear that it has a lot bigger plans for Google+ than just making it a Facebook clone. Chairman Eric Schmidt has said the company wants to make the network an identity platform for all of its properties… So yes, Google+ is noisy for some, and for others is a ghost town. Many of its features are raw and need work, like the brand page rollout. But Google is not just trying to build a place to share photos of your cat – it wants Google+ to be a social layer for everything it does, and it has some powerful levers it can pull when it comes to encouraging people to use it, such as search and email. The full impact of that integration remains to be seen, but it is far too soon to call the network dead or a loser. It’s barely even the third inning.“
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