What Google Didn’t Learn from Facebook’s Social Success
Everybody’s talking about Google’s new social venture, Google+, today. Check it out yourself and begin getting amped to use features like video chat Hangouts and extensive Social Circles. Tech blogs are betting that this time Google will get the social element of web browsing down, leaving failures like Buzz and Orkut in the past.
I admit that Google+ looks well-designed and exciting, but there’s one element of the whole release that I’m skeptical about: their limited invite system. As Tech Crunch writes,
So when can you try Google+? Here’s the thing that will be a kick in the pants to some users: Google is beginning to roll it out today, but it will only be a very limited field trial. You can submit your email address here to be entered into the system and notified as roll-outs continue, but Google says that they have no set time table for a full rollout. Again, this is phase one of what Google hopes to do with Google+, so they’re taking it slow.
From a layman’s perspective, part of what made Google Buzz less-than-engaging was that when I signed up, no one was really on it. Instead you were waiting around for people to join, and the first people using it weren’t your best friends and family members – they were tech-heads and early adapters. The lack of social relevance made Buzz instantly fall flat, meaning that people got bored with it before they saw it as a way to really connect.
When comparing this to Facebook, the original base of users was entirely different. Instead of a select group of tech-connected people, it was a bunch of college students, all connected by real-life social elements like proximity and attendance at the same university. The user base was young and open about their lives, online constantly, and eager to share, flirt, post party pictures, poke, stalk each other, whatever. Sure it was limited, but limited within a close group of people, which allowed those limits to encourage a feeling of relative privacy as a group.
This strategy was successful because it was built on the idea of a social graph, a term Mark Zuckerberg introduced to the world. A map of how people relate and interact, he’s spent years trying to translate it online using Facebook. With this as a core goal, Facebook’s functionality developed from suiting a smaller group of connected users to creating a world where people could sustain more connections than ever. When it came to functionality, features were based on how good friends, co-workers, groups and even brands/customers communicated, working slowly to invent features as social graphs changed and proved them necessary.
While Google+’s features do acknowledge social graph elements like cliques, privacy and replicating “neighbors sitting on porches,” the implementation system is backward. Instead of rolling out with a bunch of regular users and seeing how closely interconnected groups are using their tools, they’re starting out with a disconnected invite system. I’m not sure who gets access first, but I’m guessing it’s not a demographic of young, highly social people who want to flirt, gossip and impress all their friends.
I’m dying for an invite to see what it’s all about, but I won’t be able to truly understand what it is and leave relevant feedback unless the people I interact with are right there with me. Why not just open it up to entire social groups and see what problems/opportunities arise instead of carefully testing it among a small number of select individuals?
Note: What about Facebook’s attempt to pull a Gmail and release their own mail system? It could also be that hyping up a service and then creating a several-month lag time before it’s available also diminishes interest significantly. If it would have come out right after all they hype, I would have used it more. Now it’s here and I don’t think anyone is using it, at least not anyone I know. Maybe both will end up excelling at what they were good at it in the first place.
-Becky Lang