As a follow up to a previous post on Google+, here are my observations and thoughts on Google’s Facebook and Twitter problem, the impact of Google+ on Google’s Advertising Business and its Search Result Relevancy Algorithms, possible Usability Improvements to the Google+ Circles & Contact Management, the recent Google+ Glitches and SPAM issues, and existing Google Product Integration into Google+.
Google+ should Help Google Address its Facebook & Twitter Problem
Prior to Google+, Google had faced serious competition for ad dollars and search with two rivals that had created a walled garden with massive amounts of social / user-generated content. Both Facebook and Twitter were growing like a weed and Google was unable to index the user-generated content within these walled gardens in order to improve its search & ad businesses. Now, thanks to Google’s social efforts with Google+, the company will be able to both significantly improve its search advertising platform by leveraging the Google+ user-generated content for improved targeting and to provide more relevant and real-time search results by integrating a social layer into search and its search ranking algorithms.
At its core, Google+ is comparable to Facebook with a few important improvements. One such improvement in particular — the ability to add people to circles without their permission — will help Google address the Twitter problem. The ability to add anyone to your circles allows users to “follow” anyone just like on Twitter. This makes Twitter less useful given that you can now have nearly identical functionality within a Facebook-like social network.
Google+ renders Facebook and Twitter less useful by allowing people to do similar functions plus a few more fun things such as Hangouts and Huddle — all in a single place. Provided that Google succeeds with making Google+ a hit (having a 200M+ Gmail user base should help with that), starts innovating at a rapid pace, and counteract innovation from the competition in a timely fashion, both Facebook and Twitter should become less of a problem for the company long term.
Possible Improvements to the Circles & Contact Management
Google+ uses Gmail to help users populate their social graph. This is great for over 200 million Gmail users given that you don’t have to start from scratch. However, the social graph creation and maintenance process could be much easier to manage if Google+ supported nested circles and an ability to de-dupe contacts on the fly without having to manually go through all your contacts in Gmail. Otherwise, given a few thousand or even a few hundred contacts, it’s tough to first organize everyone into a single level of circles and then use these limited single-level groups to disseminate information to your social graph.
Moreover, it is quite frustrating to manage contacts with multiple records/email addresses given that there is no ability to see the actual email addresses for each record within the ”suggestions” box for the circle contacts. Meaning that when you add duplicate contacts, you may send multiple content emails or invites to the same person.
Comments on Recent Glitches & SPAM
In addition to the recent privacy issues, Google+ had an issue with SPAM yesterday. Google+ had sent multiple copies of the same invites due to a technical glitch. Google’s SVP of Social had posted a note about it this weekend:
“Please accept our apologies for the spam we caused this afternoon. For about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications. Hence our system continued to try sending notifications. Over, and over again. Yikes. – Vic Gundotra“
The above technical glitch is to be expected since the product is still in beta and is not available to the general public. However, it’s also a bit odd given that Google obviously has quite a bit of expertise with systems monitoring and capacity planning. I’m guessing that Google+ significantly exceeded Google’s best-case scenario capacity plans due to a huge demand for the new product and /or that Google+ team wasn’t able to put proper capacity plans and systems monitoring in place due to a premature product release. The latter could possibly be attributed to the the fact that under its new CEO, Larry Page, Google is now trying to bring new products to market much faster by releasing half-finished products into closed beta much earlier than Google would under Eric Schmidt.
Existing Google Product Integration into Google+
It’s exciting to see the various existing standalone Google products getting rolled up into Google+. Picasa and Blogger are getting phased out as standalone products and are getting integrated as Photos and Blogs within Google+. These product integrations should allow Google+ to better compete with Facebook Photos and WordPress / Tumblr.
Google is fighting a battle on quite a few fronts right now and it looks like Google+ is poised to help Google better position itself in the social networking space. Google+ rollout is clearly a significant milestone for Google and I wish Vic Gundotra and the Google Social team success!
Start Your Own Circle of Trust
