Don’t call Google+ a social network.
Even though its users have profiles, follow others, post status updates, upload photos and videos, and “+1″ a bunch of stuff.
But don’t call it a social network.
You see, according to a slideshow from “first time tech founder” Vincent Wong, Google+ isn’t meant to take on Facebook or Twitter. It’s meant to take on this guy:
In Wong’s world, Google+ is merely an extension of Google’s cloud strategy. Email, documents, photos, videos, etc. etc. Everything in the cloud. More specifically, everything in Google’s cloud. And everything revolving around a user’s single Google sign-in.
Google+, then, becomes just another piece of Google’s web-centric attack on Microsoft and Apple, a natural step beyond Chrome and Gmail and Google Docs. It’s not an affront to Facebook or Twitter, it’s ammunition against Microsoft’s Windows and Office platform and Apple’s iOS.
Sounds good. But I don’t buy it.
If it were really just about “collaboration”, then Google would’ve added Google Docs integration from the outset, which it hasn’t yet done. It would’ve integrated it with Gmail, which hasn’t been done. It wouldn’t have featured the “+1″ functionality as prominently. And it wouldn’t be scrambling to add Facebook-like corporate accounts.
Wong’s vision sounds nice, and there’s probably a measure of truth to it. But it doesn’t add up (no pun intended). No, Google+ is too inherently social to not call it social.
Besides, even if Wong is wight, er, right, that doesn’t mean anything. Look at Facebook and Twitter. Each is used extremely differently than how they were originally intended. Facebook started out as a college-only social network that didn’t even include a wall, let alone FarmVille. And even after it opened up to non-students, it evolved slowly. (Remember when status updates were hardcoded with the word “is”? Jason is hungry. Jason is eating a ham sandwich. Jason is thinking he really like ham sandwiches.) And Twitter’s 140-character limitation came from the original concept of updates via text messages: 20 characters for the Twitter handle and 140 for the message. Retweets, short URLs, #FollowFriday? Those didn’t come from Twitter, they came from its legion of twitterers.
So while prognosticators like Wong sound almost convincing with their nifty PowerPoint slides and terms like “blue ocean strategy”, the reality is, no one really knows what Google+ will end up being or even if it’ll stick around beyond the “ooh, what’s that?” phase. But if it does stick around, I’m betting it’ll be pretty social.
Previously:
It’s not Facebook that should be scared of Google+, it’s Twitter
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