No, James Hunt hasn’t had a bit too much cheer over new year. Hear the man out...
When Google announced the launch of its own social network, Google+ (Google Plus), it's fair to say that it was treated with some suspicion. Sprung on a largely unsuspecting public in 2011, on the surface it appeared to be a late-in-the-day attempt to create a Facebook-esque social network from a standing start - something that’d be a tall order for any company, regardless of whether they're one of the biggest online brands around or not.
Calling it an uphill struggle would be an understatement; when Google+ launched, Facebook was just cruising past the 800 million user mark and has since crossed the one billion user barrier. Even though products like Gmail, Android and YouTube all had their own large user bases, convincing those people to join another service was going to be difficult, if not impossible.
Many wondered why Google would want to set up a social network in the first place. Toppling Facebook seemed practically impossible from the start (and seems even harder now), and its attempt at launching a Twitter-like product - Buzz - ended with the service being shuttered in embarrassment. So why was Google+ considered worth doing?
There were (and are) a few obvious potential benefits: maybe Google wanted to siphon off some of the advertising eyeballs Facebook is famed for; maybe it wanted a way to consolidate and cross-pollinate existing services; maybe its just wanted to make it clear to investors that it wasn't ignoring the competition when it comes to providing users with a social platform. In truth, it was probably a little of all of these things that affected the decision.
The big benefit of Google+, though - arguably the reason it exists at all - is linked to these factors but is actually a side-product of them, and it changes the very narrative of Google+ from being a failed social network to a hidden success. It also explains why Google+ still exists in the face of disinterest, and why it probably won't go away any time soon.
The Failure Of Google+?
Before we attempt to convince you that Google+ isn't a failure, let's have a look at why many pundits and punters think it's underperformed. Ask people with an opinion on the matter and they'll probably tell you that Plus has been a flop; that, while it was supposed to be the next Facebook or Twitter, it ended up being the next MySpace - a mostly dormant network filled with abandoned profiles that were set up during an afternoon of intense interest and then immediately forgotten about.
Indeed, when you log in, there's a good chance the only posts you'll see from people you know are those wondering aloud whether anyone's still reading it, or those mentioning that Facebook/Twitter are currently inaccessible. Hardly stuff to get excited about.
The problem with starting a social network, is that you need to have enough people on it to actually be social with. People go where their friends are. Once a person is wedded to Facebook, Twitter, or any other social network, it's astonishingly difficult to get them to jump ship. You can tempt them with features, offers, exclusive content and more, but ultimately, they prefer to hang out with their friends. Trying to convince people to move to a social network where they don't know anyone? You might as well be trying to convince them to move to Jupiter.
That goes double if the social network you want them to move to isn't even offering anything new. On its launch, Google+ was criticised for its poor interface and confused security controls, but that's par for the course. It only had one really big problem: it looked as much as like an alternative to Facebook as it could, but it wasn't doing anything Facebook wasn't. All it had to set it apart was the distinct disadvantage that none of your friends were using it.
Since that time, Plus has been given at least two major redesigns and Google has grown the user base by integrating it closely with their other products. Like Microsoft's aggressive marketing of Bing as a credible rival to Google's Search product (despite indications to the contrary), Google ploughed all of its resources into making Plus viable in the long term, even if short-term reaction was unenthusiastic. To ensure the service continued to grow, Google made it actively hard for its users to not have a Google+ account. On YouTube, Google restricted feature access for video uploaders who didn't have their account connected to YouTube. It caused consternation, but it clearly didn't kill YouTube. Even if you dodged that requirement, it did similar things to Gmail, Maps, even web search to an extent. Google+ became more than just a product launch - it was a new ideological imperative for the company.
If you need evidence for that, look no further than the fact that Google integrated Plus profiles into search results, showing profile pictures next to articles written by members who had properly connected their accounts. It put 41' buttons on, well... everything. It even shut down services which might compete with it (like the much-missed Reader), and it shared Plus resources with other popular properties, like Google Talk and Blogger.
In one sense, the strategy worked. There are over 500 million profiles on Google+ and it's become the second most populous social network after Facebook. Look closely, though, and it's a virtual wasteland. Estimates suggest that more than half of all Plus accounts are inactive and ignored.
Which brings us back to the matter of how it could possibly be considered a success. If you're trying to use it like you'd use Facebook, it's demonstrably not working. So why would anyone want to build a social network that doesn't have any social activity on it? The answer to this question is what reveals the secret behind Plus' continued existence. The service might look like a failure from the perspective of users, but clearly Google doesn't think so, otherwise it wouldn't have kept it open. When recent products like Buzz and Wave failed to catch on with the public, they were quickly shuttered. You might not like Google+, we might not like Google+, but Google evidently does. Something is keeping it alive, but what?
The Success Of Google+
The secret of its success is that, really, it wasn't ever supposed to be Facebook. Sure, it looked like Facebook, and it acted like Facebook, and it did everything it could to replace Facebook in your affections. That was just a facade, though. Google+ was built to be the thing that Facebook only became later on: a platform for gathering and deploying user data. In April of this year, Vic Gundotra - the man often called the father of Google+ - left the company. As well as building the service "from nothing" (in the worlds of Google CEO, Larry Page), Gundotra was a huge champion of it within the organisation. At the time, industry gossip specifically pointed to the fact that with Gundotra gone, Google+ would no longer be developed as a product in its own right, and its developers would move elsewhere within the company. While the deemphasis of Google+ was denied, the product has been notably static for much of this year, with far fewer new features being rolled out than we had seen in previous months.
Arguably, that's because the service doesn't need new features. At this point, over 500 million users have been forced (or, let's be fair, 'legitimately convinced') to create a Google+ account. Google's +1 buttons are now part of the social web. This means real reason Google wanted its own social network has come to pass: they can now track what you're doing online, even when you're not on a Google site.
This is the secret behind Plus. Whenever you visit a site with a +1 button while your browser is also logged into Google+ (or Gmail, or YouTube, or any other service that uses your Plus profile), Google can tell that you've visited the site. They don't collect your name (because it's not important) but its analytics knows that someone of your age, gender, location and social profile visited that page at that time, whether you clicked the +1 button or not. That information can then be used by advertisers through Google's ad network to target the right adverts at you.
If you want to know how that works, here's a very basic example. Imagine, for example, that you visited a website for surfing enthusiasts. It's not hosted by Google, it doesn't contain any Google adverts, and you don't get to it through Google search. In the past, Google wouldn't know that you'd visited the page. It might have no idea that you like surfing at all.
However, should the owners put a +1 button on that page, it'll hit Google's servers when you visit to check you're logged in. Suddenly it knows that you visited a surfing website, that you did it in your lunch break and that you didn't buy anything. Google can then tell its advertisers, who can pay to ensure that every day on your lunch break, you start seeing adverts for surfing gear.
You've probably noticed this sort of thing happen. Chances are that, when you get an advert for a site you just visited, it's not chance at all. It's more likely that you're being deliberately targeted by this kind of aggressive, data-driven marketing. It sounds sinister, but it's really not as bad as it might be. This sort of behaviour is the reason social media sites allow you to use their services without paying: they can use data about you to give their advertisers the best chance of making a sale, which means you're more valuable to them as one of millions of free users rather than one of a few paid customers. Twitter does it, Facebook does it, and Google+ does it.
What makes Google+ different from Facebook is that Google+ doesn't just have access to your browsing behaviour, it's got access to your maps searches, to your YouTube history, even (to some extent) your emails. Facebook and Twitter can only dream of having that level of insight when developing user profiles.
It's not exactly a big deal that social media is about advertising. This quarter last year, Facebook made $2.3 billion. The difference is that Google made $14 billion. As advertising platforms go, that's colossal. Google+ wasn't developed to get people away from Facebook - it was developed to make Google better advertisers, and that's what it's done.
This, ultimately, is why Plus has been a success for Google: it's all data in the pot. You don't have to use it. You don't have to like it, but by integrating it with all of its major services, it made sure you did have to at least join it. That's all Google ever wanted you to do. Anything else was a bonus.