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I think the author is wrong, and for one very specific reason: Google+ is not Google's endgame. It is not their penultimate product. It's certainly an important

by cheald 15y ago

I think the author is wrong, and for one very specific reason: Google+ is not Google's endgame. It is not their penultimate product. It's certainly an important one, and Google has put an awful lot of effort in to get it right, but remember - Google doesn't live or die by its social network like Facebook does. There is little to no incentive for them to cripple their engineers with some arbitrary requirement for deep Google+ integration. Where it'll make products stronger, I expect it'll be used. Where it won't, it...won't. Google is competing with Facebook for mindshare and social graph information here, but Google+ could fail spectacularly, and people would just say "lol, Google can't do social" and keep using their other dozen market leader products. If it succeeds brilliantly, on the other hand, then people will have no _reason_ to use Facebook et al, because they're getting that need filled in the course of their other daily tasks which happen to include Google. To assume that Google+ is Google's most important product ever and that all future products will be beholden to it is to view Google as a social network company, which is entirely wrong. If Facebook was trying to launch an integrated search engine or a GMail competitor, then I would absolutely agree with you - those products would be inherently limited by the requirement that they tie into and feed back towards Facebook's core platform, but that isn't the case here.

markkat 15y ago
If Facebook was trying to launch an integrated search engine or a GMail competitor, then I would absolutely agree with you - those products would be inherently limited by the requirement that they tie into and feed back towards Facebook's core platform, but that isn't the case here. I see where you are coming from. However, given the potential overhead of running a social network, plus the revenue that might come with it, do you think that Google's priorities might evolve, -that they might morph into a social network, taking their other products with it?
- cheald 15y ago
  Not really, no. Google is an advertising company; their revenue comes from understanding people and selling that understanding by proxy to advertisers. Google+ is yet another way for them to do that, and it's just one facet of their business. It's a very powerful facet, and they have a lot to gain by making it work well, but it isn't the crown jewel. As far as overhead, I'd suspect that Google+ isn't even a blip on Google's overall radar in terms of overhead - the latest Netcraft survey puts Google as running 4.6% of all webservers on the internet; while it's certainly a large undertaking, Google is at such massive scale already that I don't think deploying a social network necessitates a severe shift in focus.

by cheald 15y ago

markkat 15y ago

If Facebook was trying to launch an integrated search engine or a GMail competitor, then I would absolutely agree with you - those products would be inherently limited by the requirement that they tie into and feed back towards Facebook's core platform, but that isn't the case here. I see where you are coming from. However, given the potential overhead of running a social network, plus the revenue that might come with it, do you think that Google's priorities might evolve, -that they might morph into a social network, taking their other products with it?

cheald 15y ago
Not really, no. Google is an advertising company; their revenue comes from understanding people and selling that understanding by proxy to advertisers. Google+ is yet another way for them to do that, and it's just one facet of their business. It's a very powerful facet, and they have a lot to gain by making it work well, but it isn't the crown jewel. As far as overhead, I'd suspect that Google+ isn't even a blip on Google's overall radar in terms of overhead - the latest Netcraft survey puts Google as running 4.6% of all webservers on the internet; while it's certainly a large undertaking, Google is at such massive scale already that I don't think deploying a social network necessitates a severe shift in focus.