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If there was one big and powerful
tech company that could dethrone Facebook from its social media kingdom, who would that
be? Think about it; there aren’t a lot of options.
That’s right, and if there’s an internet giant with the money and hierarchy to take
on Facebook, it’s probably Google. Or at least it’s definitely one of them. One might
argue if Google needed to do that, though, but when you look at Facebook not as much
as social media but also as the advertising monster that it is, then it made more sense
for Google to worry about it. And they did worry about it and created one of the biggest
failures in the history of social media apps.
Looking back at the 2010 Google, it had already been solidly dominating online searches and
was quickly becoming a significant player in the mobile space with Android. They had
mapped much of the world’s geography, indexed millions of books, and were getting into stuff
like smart wearables and building self-driving cars. It didn’t look like a company that
needed to place such a high bet on social media, but still, they did.
In this video, we’re going to remember Google Plus, Google’s most ambitious take on social
media, and its somewhat inevitable downfall to death. We’ll first revisit some of Google’s
previous attempts on social networks, then go over why and how Plus was born, review
some of the product features and development, do the necessary confrontation with Facebook
and finally get to some conclusions on the outcome.
This Startup Forensics: Google +.
As some may know, Plus wasn’t the first or second attempt from Google to create its
own social platform, trying to replicate what Facebook had done so well since its inception.
And that right there may be an important starting point: the why. We know Google wasn’t born
as a social network, even though it drives traffic on the web with its more than 2B active
users.
By 2010, Facebook was privately valued at $14B while Google’s market capitalization
was around $200B, but social wasn’t in Google’s DNA. Even people like Chris Wetherell, the
founder of Google Reader, recognized this by acknowledging that
and he went as
far as to state that
Still, since the early days, they tried hard to out-facebook Facebook, creating things
like Orkut, a social site that launched just shortly after Facebook, but that was rapidly
overtaken. Now, we know it was 2004, and Google is not a design firm or anything, but we just
want to take a couple of seconds to share this Orkut promotional video from Google’s
official account on Youtube.
OK, moving on. After Orkut, Google also launched Wave, a real-time communication platform
that apparently did a lot more than messaging. Mashable described it in a 2010 article saying
It sounds convoluted, and looking at images of its interface, it did look confusing. So,
it ultimately never took off.
But the most significant attempt on making a social platform before Plus was Google Buzz,
and this one had a particularity: it was built on the back of Gmail and was very much entwined
to it. That probably seemed like an obvious move to hit the ground running and leverage
those millions of Gmail users, but the truth is that it was poorly implemented and ended
up backfiring. Big time.
It wasn’t too late before a lot of Gmail users were surprised by now being part of
this thing called Buzz, and by finding out their email contact list and other stuff were
made public. For example, publishing your most-emailed contacts as friends, along with
other features that made other information public, without the user express consent.
As you can imagine or remember, this developed and ended up in a scandalous class-action
lawsuit that Google settled with the Federal Trade Commission at the end of 2010, by paying
$8.5M. All US Gmail users, by that time, received an unusual email from Google, clarifying the
issue and sort of apologizing but also stating that no user would earn a dime. It wasn’t
much of a goodwill gesture, but part of the agreement settled with the FTC.
So, after this bumpy road, Google persisted and, in June 2011, launched yet the most ambitious
and well-thought social platform that it had been cooking. Google Plus was released only
a few months later Buzz was turned off, but this doesn’t mean it was built lightly.
All the opposite, numerous testimonials and interviews from former executives revealed
that Plus had become a central project at Google, swallowing resources and staff from
all other units.
It’s been reported that Larry Page himself, the co-founder that had been in the shadows
for a time and returned as CEO by those days, sent an internal memo across the company and
tied 25% of employee bonuses to their success in social, meaning Google Plus. The memo said
things like,
Now, for comparison, it’s been reported that the Buzz team had not much more than
a dozen people, while the Google Plus workforce allegedly surpassed the thousand. Many of
the former executives have confirmed this implied message across the company that the
bet was all in.
But somehow, Google didn’t want to make a big buzz about it (no pun intended). They
had already done launch announcements and press stunts for their previous attempts,
like Wave or Buzz, and we all know how that went. Not that those went wrong because of
making public launch events, of course, but it seemed like Google understood that there
was little room for surprise in the social media field as the public was more than familiar
with the looks and mechanics of it, more specifically, Facebook.
Instead, with Plus, they were looking for the long term battle and somehow a more under
the hood approach, looking for a durable and steady insertion of their product in the public’s
life over the coming years.
Apparently, the fear of Facebook was also very real in Google those days, and it moved
high management into action. VP Engineering Vic Gundotra, who had a major role in Android’s
development, was put in charge of Google’s social efforts, and along with Larry Page,
they could be seen as the brains behind Google Plus. In their vision, they wanted to “fix
online sharing,” making it social and more natural, just as much as person to person
interactions as possible.
So, let’s do a quick review of Google’s Plus main features and understand how it really
worked.
The user experience probably started with “Circles.” It was the group management
feature, where you could easily group your Gmail or Google account contacts, like family
or groups of friends based on shared interests and drag them into, well, circles. Familiar
and straightforward enough, you would basically create groups with the people in your Google
contacts, somewhat based on your interactions with them. In a TechCrunch interview, Gundotra
acknowledged circles as a core feature of the product, despite also being aware that
group management features in social media weren’t particularly a hit by that time.
It turns out the Circles feature may have been one of the keys to Google Plus failure,
as suggested by MG Siegler in his TechCrunch review as an early adopter. It appeared that
in Google executive’s minds, sharing through Circles was the correct way to use Google
Plus, and it was meant to differentiate it from Facebook or Twitter. With Circles, interactions
were supposed to be more personal in the sense that you would share with your own or circles,
and not as much publicly. But this wasn’t achieved, and the very few people who posted
did it publicly, making it look just like a feed of any other social network.
Another feature was “Sparks,” a sort of interactive search engine within Google Plus,
where you would search for content of your interest and be able to share it with your
circles. This allowed some interactions like commenting and the +1 reactions, pretty much
the equivalent to Facebook likes. It also had content suggestions in the Featured interests
area, and through “instant upload” you were able to upload photos and videos from
your phone.
Then “Huddle” was a group messaging app that worked across Android, iOS, and SMS to
communicate with people in your circles. And finally, there was “Hangouts,” one that
evolved and made it into the current suite of Google apps. But back then, it was a group
video chat integrated with your circles, so if you were online and willing to video-chat,
everyone in the circle would be notified and be able to join the conference. Gundotra had
suggested that video chat wasn’t yet so popular, mostly because it was socially awkward
to do it, and they also wanted to fix that.
But all these features felt like stand-alone products, and that place where Google intended
to unify them and provide users with a single destination ended up being a ghost town. It
was all supposed to be centralized in the infamous black bar that was embedded on top
of Google’s sites, the place that you would always have access to, and where you controlled
all the functions. Some of these features evolved to become their own stand-alone app
within the current line-up of Google apps, like Photos or Hangouts.
In the end, Plus was a huge effort to unify all these features into a place where you
would create a single identity traceable across the web and socialize on the internet. It
sounds ambitious enough for a company like Google, and in a way, is what they ended up
doing, but their attempts to make it through social media were all doomed.
I wish I had used Google Plus more so I could have clearer memories of the experience of
using all those features. But the reality is that I hardly used it a handful of times,
and chances are you didn’t use it much more than that either. This became painfully evident
as time went by. In early 2015, one study published by Eric Enge at Stone Temple Consulting
revealed some of the concerning engagement metrics of Google Plus.
Google hadn’t published any data, and this was the biggest analysis of actual profiles
data to that moment. It reported that the number of active users in Google Plus was
way lower than 1% of Google users. Agreed, considering Google’s more than 2B users,
that’s still more than 100M, but the study also showed that more than 90% of people with
a profile (which was created for every Google sign up), had never publicly posted anything.
Nothing.
Furthermore, from those around 111M active users on Google Plus, only 6.7 million users
had 50 or more posts ever, and only 3.5 million of them had 50 or more posts in the last 30
days, according to the study. These are numbers that an early-stage startup would dream of,
but for Google and their bet to outrun Facebook, this screamed failure.
After witnessing the epic amounts of work and resources that were put into Google Plus,
even some former Google employees from other divisions said they were unamused when they
saw the result. It was just too much like Facebook with a Twitter sprinkle. Soon, it
became evident that the goal of taking over Facebook or at least pairing with it just
wasn’t going to happen.
On the other hand, Facebook had been thriving and catching up, with more than 1.4B users
by then and a market capitalization of already more than half of Google’s. More importantly,
Facebook profiles and feeds were vibrant, full of family and friends interactions just
happening naturally, birthday dates and pictures, and ultimately true network effects. Instead,
Google Plus never took off, despite the vast background that Google’s user base was supposed
to be, and only six months after the release, there was already a worrying sense that something
wasn’t working.
By the end of 2018, Google announced the rollout plan to turn off Google Plus “due to low
usage and challenges involved in maintaining a successful product that meets consumers’
expectations,” as read in their official statement. The plan was to shut it down by
August 2019, but the plot thickened when yet new privacy leakage scandals unveiled.
Shortly before announcing the shutdown, it was known that earlier in 2018, Google had
patched a security hole that gave third-party developers access to user profile data without
their consent. This allegedly affected data of 500K users; however, Google said it had
no evidence this data was misused by the 438 apps that could have had access. The scandal
produced further discomfort when Google admitted to having detected this but not notifying
the public at the time.
Things got worse when a bigger privacy leak was made public, this time by Google themselves
and without waiting months to do it. The new bug was only live for about six days in early
November 2018, and it was related to the Google Plus People API. It affected more than 50M
users by allowing apps that requested permission to view profile information from users, like
their names, email addresses, occupation, gender, birthday, relationship status, and
age, to access this information even when that data was set to non-public. Furthermore,
it also gave access to profile data that had been shared between users, but that wasn’t
shared publicly.
Yet again, Google said that there was no evidence that developers ever realized they had access
to this data or that it was misused in any way. The bug was introduced, detected, and
fixed within a week. After this, the Google Plus shutdown date was moved from August to
April 2019, and that was it.
So, yeah, Google’s development in social media was everything but glamorous or successful.
But not everything was so bad. On the bright side of things, Google Plus ended up providing
the blueprint for what a Google account is nowadays. Today it focuses more on productivity
and provides an infrastructure for more than 2B users to manage several critical aspects
of our lives online through its set of apps.
And ultimately, in terms of social networks, we must say that Google has the absolute winning
hand in the video department with unbeatable YouTube, which is a mature and self-sufficient
network that will never be in Slidebean Forensics.