Google+

Google+ has finally been retired as of the 2nd of April.  I think now that it has been laid to rest [for consumers at least] it is a good opportunity to step back and look at it for what it was and evaluate the whole experience.  I would like to share my interpretation of what it was, what it did right, what it did wrong, and perhaps most of all, why it failed.

What was it?

This question is both very easy and very hard to answer at the same time.  On the face of it, Google+ was a social network, intended to be a place where you could connect, share posts, network, and engage with other people.  Of course that is what it was marketed as in the public eye but privately Google+ was much more than this.  The reality behind the marketing was that Google+ was a content farm, intended as a means to enable Google to accumulate vast amounts of data that up until that point it could on glimpse at through its crawlers and through what little information is shared with it via its AdSense programme.  Services like GMail provide Google with much more information about us than the public sites we use on a day-to-day basis.  What we share privately through third party social networks was hidden from Google and for the most part obfuscated even when it had access to those services from inside through complicated API structures intended to prevent the mass collection of data of their users - although we all know now that those attempts at obfuscation failed miserably and provided no protection to the end user at all, case in point the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

No, it is quite clear despite being marketed as a social network, Google+ was ultimately a service intended to integrate Google much more intimately within our online interactions by trying to provide yet another service in-house that users had relied on third parties to provide - much in the same way that Google acquired many different services over the years and integrated them into their family of products in an attempt to make the Google Ecosystem your one-stop-shop for everything.

What did it do right?

You might find yourself asking, if the invasive nature of this endeavour was so Machiavellian then what good could possibly have come of it?  Well, the answer to this question lies in another - who used it?  The answer to the latter is quite simple, they were people who were already heavily integrated into the Google Ecosystem that this perceived level of intrusion was of no concern to them at all.  At least, those are the people who used the service first, others eventually followed but its user base remained limited.  Those who used the service found it useful, that much is clear.  As an early adopter I explored Google+ for many reasons, not least of all that I didn't care much for Facebook even back then and most other social networks had their limitations too.  What Google+ offered for me personally was the demographic that adopted it, namely that those who used it were predominantly tech-minded or had an interest in web development, programming, or computer science related fields in general.  This didn't apply to everyone of course, but it was easy to meet new people who you had no connection to beforehand through it.  One of the ways it enabled this and which other social networks today still lack, is the identification of audiences and targeting content based on those audiences.

Within Google+ nomenclature the creation of audiences was referred to as circles, and worked by asking you as a user to group other people into circles or to be added to circles.  These made it easy to post content that you could target to that specific audience.  So for example I could create a circle for people who might be interested in posts of an LGBT nature this allowed me to post LGBT centred content that wasn't pushed to everyone else.  Other social networks have attempted similar concepts perhaps the closest analogue would be Facebook Groups but the two were really not comparable.  Google+ did have separate functionality that more closely mimicked what Facebook Groups provided.  The best use-case scenario to demonstrate the limitation of other social networks that do not incorporate this functionality would be to consider someone on Twitter who may have a few thousand followers.  The chances are many of those followers will be following you for a similar reason, but the others who follow you have no interest in that same reason.  Again taking me personally, many of my followers are LGBT and have an interest in the LGBT related content I post, namely tweets about LGBT pop culture; those outside the LGBT community who follow me will likely have little or no interest in these tweets.  Therein lies the limitation of twitter, every single tweet you send is sent to a one-for-all audience, where everyone who follows you can see it, there's no distinction as to why they follow you.

There are some people I follow on twitter whose content 90% of the time I am interested in, and 10% of the time I am not.  That 10% essentially clutters my timeline, likewise the inverse is true for some people I do not follow, where 90% of their content I have no interest in, and 10% of it I do, but I do not follow them because the vast majority of the time I would see content I had no interest in.  That's a limitation of posting content without being able to target it to a specific audience.  Twitter is limited by the fact that you only really connect with people who share almost all of your interests, the lack of targeted content means you don't make potential connections with others become a reality if the overlap isn't sizeable enough.

What did it do wrong?

Without a doubt the thing Google+ did wrong most of all was actually something Google did rather than the service itself - that was to push it onto people.  When Google essentially forced anyone with a Google Account to have Google+ profile whether they liked it or not, and integrated those profiles into all other Google services, they destroyed the platform they had created and arguably poisoned many of the other services they provided - the best example of this is Youtube which many people regard as having its peak just before Google+ comments were introduced, after the integration was forced onto its users, Google destroyed many of the communities that had existed on the site and to be quite frank they fucked themselves over in the process. 

Those who had no interest in Google+ were never going to use it, trying to force them to use it was a massive mistake, both because of the sociopolitical backlash as a result but also because it actively discouraged those who had a genuine interest in Google+ from engaging with it any longer.  When content began pouring into Google+ from the other services Google provided which it integrated with the platform, it became increasingly difficult to use the platform for what it had been used for initially.  This isn't something unique to Google either, this also happened with Facebook as I have discussed in other posts, when the site first started out it was limited only to students and it provided a number of features like network pages that were centred around community development and meeting new people and engagement.  However, when Facebook opened itself to the public as a whole, one by one each of these features were removed and the content that flooded into the site made it increasingly difficult to actually use the site for networking, it ultimately ended up as a place for connecting only with people you already knew and has progressed now to a point where users are actively discouraged from engaging with people they don't know because of privacy and safety concerns.  The lesson here is that you need to know your purpose, your audience, and your niche and serve it well; the second you attempt to make it generic or mainstream is the second you ruin the unique selling point that you had in the first place.

Why did it fail?

After Google took something that had a defined use, a demographic, and a utility, then turned it into something with no clear purpose, marketed towards everyone they possibly could, and left its users with no real benefit, the service died.  The platform that had been created was dismantled, Google's greed and underlying desire to farm content was exposed, the social networking aspect of the service was irrelevant, Google simply wanted data, as much of it as it could get, from as many people as it could get, and when organic growth did not satisfy that greed they pursued underhanded tactics to try and force that growth and it failed.  Google Buzz in much the same way also failed as a predecessor to Google+ its downfall was the fact Google pushed integration with GMail, again intended to fast-track the service to a larger audience with no concern whatsoever as to whether that audience actually had an interest in the service to begin with.

Google+ failed for the same reason many of Google's other endeavours also failed - Google isn't good at growing.  That might seem like an incredulous statement to make considering the size of their search engine and their market dominance but I stand by this assertion, Google sucks at growing.  When you look at the long list of services that Google has launched over the years and how many failed, you can see time and again that they were unable to take those services from their infancy and nurture them into something mature and well developed.  When you look at the wealth of successful services today that Google offers beyond search, many of these services such as Youtube and Blogger as prime examples were not Google creations.  They were created by third party companies and existed as products in their own right and continued to grow until Google took an interest and bought those services.  What these two services as prime examples also demonstrate is that Google never made the mistake with them of trying to integrate them into other Google services to the point where they did not retain their identity.  Youtube retained its branding as did Blogger and each service continued to serve their intended audiences and provided the features that their respective user bases desired.  It really wasn't until the Google+ debacle that Google overstepped its mark and encroached on Youtube to a point where its influence became invasive, and as we have already discussed above, this was a poison pill moment for the platform, something which Google in the end finally backtracked on, although it took them an unreasonably long time to actually admit defeat and try and restore the site to what it was - something which arguably they still have not been able to do as the impact of Google+ is still felt within the communities on Youtube that were so badly impacted by it.

Google sucks at growth, and when you look at its attempts to expand in markets like China you can see how difficult it is for them to achieve organic growth.  Their search engine remains their flagship product and whilst you can make many arguments as to why it retains its market dominance, arguably the positive feedback loop assessment fits most easily, that is to say it is popular because it is popular, and it's difficult for any newcomer or existing alternative to challenge that popularity.  There is an article at CBS News by Erik Sherman from 2010 which I feel is still relevant today, which highlights Google's inadequacies when it comes to marketing, notably raising the point that Google seemingly has no emotional intelligence.  This however, I do not believe is something unique to Google.  Some large tech companies that grew quite rapidly do not seem to have learned much about their users rationale and reasoning despite the magnitude of data they hold belonging to those users. 

There was a TEDTalk recently where Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter discussed the future of the platform and possible upcoming changes, notably the desire to remove the counters for Likes and Retweets, possibly removing the functionality entirely, as well as a move away from the current structure of the platform by potentially scrapping the follower and following functions entirely, the rationale being that users would instead follow topics or trend and engage with those rather than following individuals.  I do fear that the same Google+ moment is approaching for Twitter as that which hit Youtube where functionality will be forced onto users who do not want it, and the functionality that they currently use and find appealing will be removed.  Youtube still hasn't recovered from this fundamental mistake that Google made and if Twitter follows through with some of the changes that Dorsey discussed then I think it could be the end for Twitter.

I am not alone in this fatalistic assessment of Dorsey's comments, Wired published an article by Emily Dreyfuss titled 'Jack Dorsey Is Captain of the Twittanic at TED 2019' where she also discusses his comments in much greater detail and crucially notes that Dorsey, like Google, is more concerned with what he wants, rather than what the users of the platform want.  The article details a long list of concerns that users of the platform have, and how Dorsey avoided almost all of these questions when they were put to him.  For someone who portrays themselves as having empathy he seems disturbingly incapable of expressing it.  Google exists for the most part as a faceless entity, there are a few key people associated with it who sometimes speak at events but for the most part there is no one person in particular that embodies Google, it is perhaps easier to accept it as being void of a human connection then, more so than other platforms.  Facebook and Twitter by contrast have Mark Zuckerbeg and Jack Dorsey respectively as the faces of those platforms, as people who the negativity that exists on those platforms is becoming increasingly attached to and associated with, not just by the public but by politicians and by regulators. 

It can be hard to imagine that these platforms might one day be gone, but that would not be unprecedented.  Larger corporations have collapsed, Facebook employs approximately 30,000 people and Twitter employs approximately 4,000 people.  They are both relatively large companies but they are by no means the largest.  Walmart and McDonald's for instance employ 2.3 million and 1.9 million people respectively which dwarves both of these companies.  Facebook and Twitter have revenues of $56 billion, and $3 billion respectively, and again by comparison, Walmart and McDonald's have revenues of $514 billion and $21 billion respectively.  These are just two examples, but whilst both of these can be considered healthy companies, by contrast, in 2001 when Enron declared bankruptcy it had 29,000 employees - comparable in size to Facebook, and had revenue of $100 billion, twice that of Facebook yet it still filed for bankruptcy due to the scandal that hit the company, the specifics of which aren't relevant here, what is relevant is the point that bigger companies than Facebook and Twitter have gone down in flames before now, it is not a given that any company will be around forever, size is not salvation, if anything it puts the company at a much greater risk, particularly since both of these companies had to invest as they scaled upward and it isn't so easy to scale downward and dispose of much of the infrastructure they invested in if it were no longer needed - that at least is one area where Google still thrives, its pockets are deep and it can for now at least still afford to make expensive mistakes without suffering austerity as a result, so Google+ in that vein will leave no great economic impact on the company as a whole, if anything, the restructuring of Google Inc into Alphabet Inc safeguarded the company by compartmentalising its services to the point where individually they can fail completely without having a contagion effect on other services the company provides.