Opposable Planets As the Name Suggests: Google Plus will be an "And" not an "Or"

As the Name Suggests: Google Plus will be an “And” not an “Or”

Submitted by Joshua-Michéle on July 2, 2011 – 12:07 pmView Comments

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

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The media is framing Google Plus as a direct competitor to Facebook – either Google Plus or Facebook. After a few hours with it – I think this is the wrong framing.

Despite the fact that Google Plus and Facebook share of the same core functions their marketing approach and their native bias (Facebook is driven by social insight, Google engineering ) leads to a totally different pattern of adoption and utility in the market.

In social networks it is all about adoption… and in getting adoption narrow-and-deep beats shallow-and-wide. Google generally launches shallow-and-wide (to a wide group – even in beta – with no clear audience in particular) and hopes the resulting PR will provide traction. Social networks grow best by developing and saturating the niches of actual users first (epitomized by Facebook starting off at Harvard then moving on to other colleges before expanding wider…). Actual users provide the PR through direct engagement with the tool. At bottom this is a marketing insight. Social tools need saturation within a community (people with shared interests) to really gain such traction. I don’t see this happening with Google Plus in the broadest market where Facebook dominates.

Second, most of the tools that achieve critical mass begin by doing one thing well and making it dead-simple. Think Twitter, Foursquare or Instagram and so on. For the average user I think Google Plus is over-engineered; designed to force choices that people don’t explicitly make in real life (see Google Wave for previous demonstration of this principle). One of the front and center features of Google Plus is Circles, which prompts you to make many decisions about the types of social circles you will have. This is essentially taking the Facebook lists feature and putting it on steroids. Lists haven’t taken off on Facebook or Twitter because human beings don’t set up fixed (read explicit) category structures as they move through their social world. You are my co-worker, then become my acquaintance, then a former-coworker and friend, then back to an acquaintance and then a business contact. Do I want to keep shifting my lists? Does it matter? Putting circles as a priority in the interface assumes that privacy and the reification of the delicate divisions in the social graph has an equivalent central place for users. I think this is a mistake.

Finally, the analysis of Google Plus has largely focused on functionality rather than utility. Reviewers (generally tech savvy) do not reflect the use case of normal people who will give Google Plus one minute of their time to provide value before abandoning it and heading back to Facebook (or Twitter for that matter). Thus most reviews make the mistake of expressing the possibilities of the tool but not its real potential for adoption.

In the either/or scenario, mass adoption of Google Plus would require an exodus from Facebook. The switching costs are high indeed and Google Plus doesn’t provide the surplus value to warrant it. While it makes for good copy we are not looking at an either/or here.

Time will tell.