What Google Really Isn't Doing in 2008
David Carpe, of passingnotes.com, has an awful post on what he thinks Google is going to do in 2008:What Google is Really Doing for 2008.
Carpe's big idea is that Google is going to flip a switch on what will be the biggest social network in the world by knitting together each of its different social apps (Google Pages, Calendar, Gmail, etc.). He thinks this is going to blow MySpace / Facebook / etc. off the map.
What Carpe doesn't realize is that Google's not cool. It's slick, it works really well, it 'organizes the world's information'. But it's not cool. And social networking sites, at least the ones that target teenagers (the heaviest users), need to be cool. They need to stand for something, whether it's music (like MySpace or Last.fm) or college gossip and hookups (Facebook) or whatever. By standing for something, and basing their design decisions around that one thing, the best networks create communities with distinct feelings.
So, David: Who, exactly, identifies with 'organizing the world's information'?
Carpe's big idea is that Google is going to flip a switch on what will be the biggest social network in the world by knitting together each of its different social apps (Google Pages, Calendar, Gmail, etc.). He thinks this is going to blow MySpace / Facebook / etc. off the map.
What Carpe doesn't realize is that Google's not cool. It's slick, it works really well, it 'organizes the world's information'. But it's not cool. And social networking sites, at least the ones that target teenagers (the heaviest users), need to be cool. They need to stand for something, whether it's music (like MySpace or Last.fm) or college gossip and hookups (Facebook) or whatever. By standing for something, and basing their design decisions around that one thing, the best networks create communities with distinct feelings.
So, David: Who, exactly, identifies with 'organizing the world's information'?
Labels: facebook, Google, MySpace, social-networking
3 Comments:
dude, what on earth are you talking about? the users of 'cool identity-driven' social networking sites represent a very, very small portion of the entire planet, the entire internet user base and the entire business user base...social networking does not require that one identify with the mission or position of the firm (a la myspace), but rather that the service provide some relevant level of utility....in order for people (both individual and business) to collaborate and grow collaborative user bases, and in turn increase the volume of relevant google-oriented transactions, there is simply a need for a profile publishing tool with a layered (and integrated) search tool...in fact, this already does exist in a minor form within existing apps like gtalk, gmail, docs and so on (permission level viewing of docs for example, from a larger integrated contact base shared across apps via single sign-on)...
your post offers absolutely no evidence to the contrary other than to say that google, one of the world's most popular brands, will be unable to rally users into using their services as a connection platform...that's just a baseless statement...
there is nothing about elgoog's position and services offering (coupled with technology) that would preclude them from doing this today, tomorrow or whenever they feel ready...
and btw, doesn't the addition of grandcentral seem like an even more likely piece of this utility for socialization? whatevah...
seriously, thanks for taking the time to really mull it over.
-dave
(you know, from passingnotes.com)
Dave:
Thanks for your well-considered post. It's definitely true that Google has built / bought a range of social applications which, were they linked together, would be a very powerful social network-like tool. However, using it would not really feel like using a social network, since it would feel sterile.
Because of its size, anything that Google does has to be generic. And being generic is antithetical to the success of social networks.
A Google social network would, in my opinion, be in danger of becoming like MSN Spaces - full of people who haven't figured out what MySpace is.
Getting people to spend the time to make a social network meaningful and cool requires that the network mean something, that it have a personality. Doing that inevitably means turning some people off. And Google can't do that, because it has to please everybody.
uh, looks like i was right dude...thanks.
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