By Henry Copeland, CEO, Blogads.com
Henry Copeland, founder, CEO, Blogads
Having read many claims that ‘Google+ will kick Facebook’s ass,’ I’ll go out on a limb and predict that Google+ will fail miserably.
Or at least won’t dislodge Facebook anytime soon.
First, let’s stipulate that the Google+’s technology is cool and powerful. Former NYT tech journalist Jennifer 8 Lee says “Facebook should be scared.” Over at PC World, Mark Sullivan offers “9 Reasons to Switch from Facebook to Google+.” (Here’s a video intro to Google+ if you’re interested.)
News maven Jeff Jarvis enumerates the features he thinks will make Google+ an important journalistic tool.
Jason Calacanis, the entrepreneur behind WeblogsInc and Mahalo, argues that Google+ will take “half the market” for social networking from Facebook. “Google+ will compete with Facebook as effectively as Android is competing with the iPhone.”
Google+ features that beat Facebook’s
To prove his point, Jason highlights a number of Google+ features that beat Facebook’s — features like “Forced categorization of contacts” and “Chrome Browser and Chrome Store integration” and “Android integration.”
And with more than 200 million deeply invested Gmail users, Google would seem to have a powerful launch pad.
So if Google+’s technology is brilliant, its userbase is deep, Facebook’s functionality is flawed and all the pundits are convinced Google will romp, why am I confident that Google+ will fail to beat Facebook?
Because in their Google worship and/or their focus on comparing features, the pundits are forgetting tried and true axioms about how humans adopt technology, axioms documented decades ago by tech visionaries like Gordon Moore and Clayton Christensen. Here’s my rundown.
1) Even the best carpenter can’t build a tree. Though Google+ is an elegant piece of engineering, it’s not a social network. Jason and Jeff love Google’s technical innovations. Sure, normal technology thrives because of technical brilliance, design beauty and marketing megatonnage. But social networks are affected only marginally by those factors.
Instead, in social networks, the users are the product. Users’ habits and passions and commitments to each other are the life-force that makes a social network grow. Just as you can’t build a tree from a bunch of boards, you never could have constructed Facebook or Twitter or eBay or LinkedIn or Wikipedia top-down with a bunch of prefab components.
Launching with one hundred million users or a $100 million marketing budget would have more likely killed those sites, not grown them. (One advantage Google WILL have, at least initially, is fewer bimbots than Facebook.)
2) Wrong launch users. Passionate persistent users, not brilliant designers or programmers or professional commentators, build social networks. Google+ is launching with a diffuse cloud of alpha-tester geekerati who view Google+ as a feature set to be explored, tested and rated. Having the attention span and loyalty of fleas, this jittery crowd will migrate onward within weeks to the next hot-smelling technology that swaggers into view.
Beyond sharing a common identity as “early adopters,” members of this crowd don’t (usually) care deeply about each other or share a common passion beyond a burning desire be first in using a technology. They’re users, not community members.
Google’s diffuse-by-invites strategy works fine for a tool like Gmail, which is evaluated purely as a feature set, but it won’t work for Google+. Evidence: my friend Dan Gilmore, who as an innovator and former reporter for San Jose Mercury News should have more Google+ connections than anybody, went onto Facebook to look for friends who might also be using Google+. With no luck.
It doesn’t matter to you if 1 million or even 100 million people are using a social network, if only one of your 20 key colleagues and friends are using it. With social networks, it takes at least three to tango.
3) Diffuse launch path. Social networks can ONLY start small and tight with a set of enmeshed users, then percolate slowly outward. Facebook started in a Harvard dorm, then spread across Harvard, then to Stanford, Columbia and Yale. Then other Ivy League schools. Then colleges across the US. Then high schools. Then Microsoft and Apple. Only then, 30 months after launch, was Facebook opened up to everyone.
Comparison with Twitter
Likewise, Twitter started with messages between Biz Stone, Ev Williams and Jack Dorsey and their friends in San Francisco in March of 2003. It percolated there for a year, before expanding in March of 2007 into the tightly networked SXSW crowd, folks who were hungery for a way to recreate and sustain their SXSW friendships when they left Austin. That crowd, in turn, evangelized to their social network savvy friends at businesses across the US.
For both Facebook and Twitter, initial users were tightly networked. There was a strong sense of clubbiness among community members through a long initial phase. Those members’ loyalty to the club withstood even repeated outages (on the part of Twitter) and privacy concerns (on the part of Facebook) that would have doomed a normal technology product.
4) Noisy feedback loops. One of the key reasons that launching big is fatal to social networks is because the feedback loop from users to designers to users to progammers to management to newbs to old-timers to programmers gets cluttered with noise. When a tool launches big, its designers end up trying to build a feature set that satisfies all communities — or their own peculiar whims. Most users end up with a luke-warm affection for the service. There’s no ‘sponsor’ community to advocate change or evangelize.
MIT professor Eric Von Hippel has amply documented the importance of users in driving innovation in technology domains as diverse as thermoplastics, semi-conductors and scientific instruments. Is there any doubt that user innovation would be even more crucial in shaping social networks, where the user and the product are so closely entwined, functioning as two ends of the same biocyber synapse?
Rather than launching big and broad, far better to build a “small” tool for one passionate community. Once the kinks get worked out, this template of technology and usage patterns later gets adopted/adapted by other adjacent communities. Using this approach, people like to feel they’re in a human-sized space in which their actions matter, in which their feedback into the system gets processed and used. (Gordon Moore’s bookCrossing the Chasm is awesome about this process.)
(It’s worth noting that Robert Scoble thinks Google+ is just for geeks and will survive by serving that market alone. I think geeks don’t just want to socialize with geeks… for long.)
5) Professional managers. Successful social networks evolve over time, often blossoming out of series of random, non-linear, unpredictable connections and chemistry. In retrospect, the winner’s strategy looks obvious (read Duncan Watts’ book!), but at any given moment, it is impossible to determine what feature set or user base will drive the coming decade’s NEXT dominant social network.
Professional managers, particularly of software projects, can’t tolerate this kind of nonlinear growth. In his post about Google+, Jason notes that he wrongly predicted huge success for Wave, Google’s previous attempt at social software launched with great fanfare two years ago, because Google ultimately stopped devoting resources to Wave. Why should things be different this time?
Google is a big public company that needs high-profile successes not meandering muddles that may eventually pay off. This means Google will likely give up on Google+ before it can take root, just like it killed Wave. Clayton Christensen’s brillian bookInnovator’s Dilemma gives the playbook.
6) No culture. Starting big and broad also kills the chance for a social network to develop a distinctive culture. This is crucial because a great social network is known by its culture, its lingo, its behaviors, its taboos, its history. Some examples:
Overwhelmed by the volume of information flowing from Twitter, Tweeters (not Twitter) created hashtags to keep track of ideas.
Back in 2004, the liberal blog DailyKos was playing a key role in narrating and steering the Democratic party’s primaries. The site was getting lots of favorable press, and I asked Markos Moulitsas, the community’s creator and curator, whether this attention was having a big positive impact on the community. On the contrary, Markos replied. Every time there was big press about the site, the community would flood with new users who didn’t get the site’s culture.
Traffic would spike briefly, but interaction quality would plummet. A big gush of new members busted the site’s chemistry. Then DailyKos would shrink back to its previuos size and start growing organically again. Since then, the Kos community’s richness has spawned its own yearly convention.
(Another example of Kossite culture: to this day, a novel ad campaign can’t run on DailyKos without invoking communal cries of “pie fight,” an insider reference to an infamous, bodacious 2005 ad campaign by Turner Broadcast for a Gilligan’s Island reality show.)
For another example of how growth can kill a social network’s culture, look no further than the Q&A community Quora‘s explosion/implosion early this year. Once a steadily growing service, rich with VC and tech insiders, Quora suddenly went viral in January. New users flooded into the service and quality of interactions plummeted. Despite lots of agonizing over how to sustain the growth, http://quorareview.com/2011/01/27/evolving-quoras-design-for-growth/ the site has fallen back to earth.
In contrast, the Q&A service Stackoverflow, which is tightly focused on serving specific communities and growing organically for the last three years , has overtaken Quora. Notice in the Google trends graph for the two services that Quora has gotten a huge amount of press (bottom trend box), but Stackoverflow is now far bigger.
Am I a Luddite or Google-hater? Judge for yourself. I started tweeting in March of ’07. I was LinkedIn’s 4,154th user. I even own a few Google shares — their ad business is a money-printing machine.
Summing up: Google’s great at carpentry. Gardening, not so much.
Henry Copeland is founder and CEO of Blogads.com. Reprinted by permission from: www.blogads.com
Henry is @hc //and blogs at http://blog.web.blogads.com.
Join hundreds of Marketing Professionals and Internet Execs at Atlanta’s premier Digital event – Digital Summit 2012
www.digitalsummit.com
Related Stories:
- Will Google + take down Facebook?
- Vary content on different social media sites to keep fans engaged
- Google+ leaps to 50M members in one week 1,269 percent growth
- Yahoo adding Facebook Connect, Google inlcuding Twitter login option
- Businesses need to adopt Google+ due to changes in search results (infographic)
© 2011, TechJournal. All rights reserved.
Tags: Blogads.com, DailyKos, Dan Gillmor, Duncan Watts, ebay, facebook, Google+ will fail, Henry Copeland, Jason Calacanis, LinkedIn, Mahalo, noisy feedback loops, Quora, Stackoverflow, twitter, viewpoin, WeblogsInc, Wikipedia
You said:
**Passionate persistent users, not brilliant designers or programmers or professional commentators, build social networks. Google+ is launching with a diffuse cloud of alpha-tester geekerati who view Google+ as a feature set to be explored, tested and rated. Having the attention span and loyalty of fleas, this jittery crowd will migrate onward within weeks to the next hot-smelling technology that swaggers into view.
Beyond sharing a common identity as “early adopters,” members of this crowd don’t (usually) care deeply about each other or share a common passion beyond a burning desire be first in using a technology. They’re users, not community members.**
Wow, like to insult your readers much? Who do you think reads sites like this?
I’m an early adopter, have always been, have been involved in Friendster and Facebook from very early in their launch, as well as LinkedIn (early adopter, as well), early gmail user, early android user, beta game tester… I still use FB, still use LinkedIn, still use Android devices (which I love, tyvm), still use gmail, etc. But hey! Attention span and loyalty of a flea. Which apparently applies to all my friends who are also tech adventurous and big social network users.
If you can’t make a point without being insulting, why make it at all? Think I’ll pass on your “insight,” henceforth.
We must point out that the opinions are those of Mr. Copeland’s, who is himself an early adopter (as we at the TechJournal are) of many of the social networking technologies discussed. We suspect Google+ may do better than the search engine giant’s first attempt to get into the social networking game. It seems to have more buzz. But until its open to everyone, all this is speculation. We doubt, though, that it will be a Facebook killer.
–Allan Maurer, TJS editor.
Sorry I’ve offended you with the flea metaphor. You list a few tools you’ve been loyal to, but how many services/tools/products have you left behind? By definition, the alphatester crowd abandons 20 tools for every one it stays with. Maybe I should have gone with bonobos, which mate indiscriminately?
I agree with Ms. Geekerati Flea.
I’m loving the google+ launch, and service re-brand its been a very exciting fortnight so far. They’ve hit the nail on the head for exactly what I want, and I imagine that will be the same of millions of other users.
“Why Google+ will fail: social networks grow like trees, not on them”
-or-
“How to troll the launch of a new application with a headline I’ll then negate in the second paragraph.”
Love the progression:
1) Google+ will fail
2) Google+ will fail miserably
3) Or at least won’t dislodge Facebook anytime soon.
Luckily that saved me from taking any of your article seriously, though CEO Troll did manage to accumulate another comment.
Mission accomplished. Well done.
Going to +1 this comment, but I won’t “like” it.
How about that for a troll?
Copland – You are making a rather false comparison, I think. Loyalty and usefulness are two completely different things. Why would anyone be loyal and/or continue to use something they have no personal use for? Moving on doesn’t necessarily demonstrate that lack of attention-span; sometimes it simply reflects no real need for a service. (And yes, for the record, I’ve tried a zillion and one things. I mention the giants because those are the names everyone references – but I also use Hi5, GoodGameStudios, some lesser known 3D socialization environments. It’s hardly a small group of major players that I use.)
I don’t, for instance, have a need for Google Finance, but I do use Google Scholar, Books, Apps, etc. I’m “loyal,” if you will, to the things that serve a purpose in my life. That’s going to be the hinge on which G+ revolves – is it useful or does it serve a purpose to enough people? I think it will. It won’t necessarily be the exact same purpose or use as Facebook – though there’s overlap, of course – but for a good chunk of the people with whom I interact, it probably will be very attractive. It’s already attracted a handful of folks I know that have associated themselves with no other social networks to date.
Finally, concerning the loyalty of fleas – might want to consider that metaphor. The fleas I’ve known are pretty damned tenacious in hanging on to their hosts! But in seriousness, why do you need to use insulting metaphor at all? What’s the point?
It’s simply not true that technical factors don’t impact the success of a social network. Friendster died from inability to scale. MySpace was written on a ColdFusion platform that was difficult to modify. Facebook has won largely on their ability to innovate quickly. Their speed & rapid iteration led to the news feed, the f8 platform, and simple photo tagging. And still there are large user experience problems (a lack of relevance in the News Feed, a photo importer which largely does not work on the Mac, mobile apps which lag behind in capabilities).
The large number of users is actually not a defensible competitive edge. The reason is because the growth is so fast, from 60 to 700 million users in 3 years. This indicates that importing and building friend lists is not that difficult for the users. It seems we are in for a feature race.
I have to disagree with a major flaw in one of your arguments… Not every new product has to evolve the same as the first. Heres is what i mean… when a car, plane, or even a social hub like facebook were invented, they did not have to start from scratch. They added to the previous. After a few cars were on the rode, people were not told how every function of the car works. They were sold as ” well you know that Ford model-T, well this is the same but it comes with this extra feature. When facebook was invented they didnt have to tell people what a social network was, they said this is MySpace, but here is the benefits of Facebook over Myspace… After almost 8 years of Social Networking, people dont need to start from scratch to “get it”. Google is selling it as ” this is facebook but better, heres why…..”
People, especially young ones, will move on as they have done with EVERY prior invention. Google+ is a good step forward in social networking. They are doing something that facebook could and will never do…. Bringing the COMPLETE internet to one social platform.
is terrible. You are MUCH more likely to fail than G+. G+ has the entirety of all Google products to enhance its experience vs Facebook which has failed on almost ALL counts. They never stop to “change” which is always bad. Moron.
You all have been trolled!
Ultimately you’ve got to look at it from a non-early adopter’s point of view. An early adopter will flock to something purely because it’s new and shiny. If it offers anything different whatsoever, they’ll be there.
The normal folks, generally can’t be bothered to sign up for something without a very good reason. The general population don’t give a **** about new and shiny websites. Looking at it objectively, there is pretty much nothing different to Google+ than Facebook. And there will soon be even less after Facebook observe the good parts of Google+ and adapt them into Facebook.
And ‘Google’ isn’t a particularly cool brandname for a social network, it’s a very geeky brandname. People love it as a search engine and other things because the general public expect a search engine to be geeky, a geeky social site? Errrrm no, those don’t mix.
I was expecting something vastly different to Facebook, something like a new twitter. I am severely let down, this will make no impact whatsoever. Hello Google Wave II
Google+ may well not be a “Facebook killer” for tweo simple reasons:
1) Facebook has a 750M user head start
2) Many Facebook users have the rather juvenile belief that their Facebook friends really are friends, not just people looking to belong to a crowd.
Four million Facebook users have left in the last few months, not because they are unhappy, but because they have left college and are job hunting. They want to remove potentially damaging content from Facebook. The also want to move on to new relationships.
Google+ has two innovations that will make that migration unnecessary. Circles and reasonable control over privacy settings.
Google+ will grow slowly but steadily and will always be the choice of people who think about what their relationships really mean.
Once Google+ reaches a reasonable size (months not years) I will no longer need both Facebook and Linkedin to manage personal and business relationships.
I have to disagree with point #2 (and most of your post really but let’s just focus on this point for the moment). When Facebook launched, it also launched to a small tightly formed group of users, the difference is that there was no cap on who could be invited. Google is simply executing this the way they know how, design, develop, user test, iterate, publish. This is what they have always done. I do agree it is pretty boring at the moment with no friends to play with but soon enough I’m sure I’ll be able to interact with all the people I usually do by email or on other social networks. I don’t foresee Google completely destroying Facebook because of the large FB user base but G+ will not crash and burn like their other attempts at social.
Great thoughtful article.
I am myself an early adopter and geek too, and I can tell that when it comes to friends the most famous people are powering the social networks and this are at the opposite end to geeks! For me as a geek the email is social enough!
Disappointed about the Google+ invite system which is the opposite of transparency. After loosing a few days trying to use my Google+ invitations I was so frustrated by the opacity of the phenomenon (I didn’t receive no email to wait or what is going on) that I stopped to use Google at all, and I use it from the beginning.
You can see that they are trying every angle now to pump the +1 method , on the search , on analytics on GWT. All guns blazing now over the last few weeks. Will be interesting to see the market reaction if the +1 starts to make a large impact on the PR.
Your headline is powerful, then after only one sentence you back off totally. “Or at least won’t dislodge Facebook any time SOON”?! —-Covering your butt?
It’s really funny How we have this “experts” saying How social networks develop end evolve… We are writing that history, sir! The real thing is, nobody knows because what we had before Google+ was a “fish tank” where you needed to add everybody as “friends” to communicate with them. So, all this speculation about How this story must be written, is very silly. About the early users and our motivations, you’re disrespectful but I really don’t care about it.
This product will fail miserably!
…well, it won’t immediately succeed beyond all reasonable expectations, at least.
Pfft. What a troll.
Anyone that comes up with the statement “I’ll go out on a limb and predict that Google+ will fail miserably. Or at least won’t dislodge Facebook anytime soon.” is just trying to be controversial and get link bait for their own product.
I think this article has some valid points. I disagree on “Even the best carpenter can’t build a tree”: carpenters armed with molecular engineering technology will build much better trees (geeky enough for Google+ ?)
I guess the success or failure of Google+ after the first phase of interest in the new toy will depend on the quality of interaction and the ability of the system to support it. I think they should focus on implementing Groups soon. From my review of Google+ written a few days after it went out:
“I can certainly see the advantages of selective sharing. Especially for young people who can now have different Family, Friends, School and Work circles, but strangely I think most young people may stay on Facebook and ignore Google+, leaving the latter to us grown-ups. Also, perhaps only persons with some degree of computer literacy will use Google+ frequently: if Wave is for computer geeks only, and Facebook is for everyone including your granddaughter and grandfather, Google+ may occupy the mid ground.”
http://spacecollective.org/giulio/6953/Google-First-impressions-and-thoughts
I recently created a feature matrix to compare the offerings from Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and G+. It’s notable that MS and Y! built their trees a long time ago but without any significant adoption beyond fanboys and marketers looking to put up shop anywhere. This would seem to confirm the basic premise of this article. You can see the matrix at http://bit.ly/nmaey7
alpha-tester geekerati and proud of it!!!
if we did’d exist no one would read what you write!
Okay, I see valid points on both sides.
Here is why I think Google+ will work:
Despite the fact that Facebook has over 750 million users, it has become anything but user friendly. Over the past few years, it has changed features on a continual basis. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem, but the difference with Facebook is, it shifts from what already works fine to something that is broken, buggy, and confusing. To make my point, I will use one of the best examples. Facebook chat has slowly morphed into a miserable way to instant message people conveniently and with privacy.
At this point, Facebook has incorporated an overall messaging scheme that combines email, private messaging, and instant messaging into one. Now, you can’t separate chat messaging from private messaging, or email if you use your Facebook email. By combining the system, all messages are fused and archived. This makes it hard to focus on conversations and nearly impossible to separate and stay organized. Now important or more essential messages and non important instant messages are all in the same stream. All messages are now archived, even those you thought were gone from years past, still are saved into the Facebook database. What does this mean? Little to no control over your messaging privacy. Instead of a clear option, an “archive” option is now displayed.
Lastly, the main chat toolbar continually crashes, fails to load, and does not accurately show who is on/offline. Users’ chat crashes without their knowledge, instant messages don’t send properly, and now offline users still show up on the toolbar. The online user lists don’t match, and you can do little to fix the glitches.
I apologize for going on so long, but this was one of many problems I have with Facebook right now. I am not a geeky technician or website developer. I am an average college student, and have been using social networking since Myspace. I understand that Facebook will try to copy and paste from Google+ as well, but let’s face it, though Facebook has great features, those can be copied and perfected as well. The difference with Google will be, they will be more user friendly and not plagued with errors like Facebook. Any feature they try to copy from Google+ will just be a broken and hard to use add-on that might not be worth it for users in the future. Facebook has lost it’s touch with me, and I think Google has it pegged. So regardless if Facebook survives, I think I know where I will be going.
A well formed and thought-provoking view. If only we could all see things so clearly. thank you.
Coming from someone with as much experience as you with social media sites… it is hard to disagree. I do like the +1 feature to personalize search results, but they have an enormous mountain to climb to start up successful communities.
G+ has already added 20bn to Googles market cap. So how can you say it will fail miserably?
Interesting read, but I’ll only comment on one section that I believe is crucial…
“Passionate persistent users, not brilliant designers or programmers or professional commentators, build social networks.”
Speaking from personal experience, Google+ currently has a much better social community and peer to peer interaction than facebook… I believe the way it’s structured truly allows for community’s to develop around common interests. I’m a photographer, and since inception, the community on Google+ has just exploded, with some seriously great photographers on there. Granted, alot of them are tecchies (geeks as you say!), but I’m starting to see more working professionals sign up and interact.
It will take time, but I think Google has recognised what they can offer that Facebook can’t… community. Only time will tell