[nixos]

Google killed its golden egg.

Google lives off the open web. Two out of four of its main products depend on the open web:

1. Search - the less of an open web, the less is searchable by Google. Facebook is a classic example. 2. AdWords/AdSense - Facebook, CNN, BBC don't need it. They have their own networks, and they 're big enough to offer a "take it or leave it" approach.

(The only two main products not relying on Open Web is Google Cloud and Android).

Google actually had everything set up, a social network (blogger), a wall (reader), IM (Google Voice, email).

But they decided that FB is taking over. What did they do? They made "their own FB". Which solved no one's problems. Google+ had nothing over FB (except for circles, which FB promptly copied), and killed their old social apps.

Now their running around as a chicken without a head.

[devoply]

That's a great point. Google should want the blogosphere to exist as a matter of competitive advantage. The higher ups in Google need to listen to this. They can still bring the blog back, and make the internet great again!

[amelius]

As I pointed out in other comments, something like FB can never be truly open for the simple reason that most people really don't want their posts to be searchable by everybody. Facebook is Facebook because you can post silly things on it without worrying if some future employer could find them if they wanted to. Sometimes an information silo can actually be a good thing, I suppose. But perhaps more research into federated social networks could take away this concern.

[nixos]

Theoretically, Google could let you "hide" certain posts if you're not logged in.

The thing that killed blogs as they are is that they're too serious. When signing up you need a title, subtitle, and input is optimized for long essays. Facebook is optimized for sign up, write your name, find friends, and post pictures, videos and sometimes text.

Really, if Google+ was Blogger Basic where you sign up, put AdWords, post pics, and it could have taken off.

[devoply]

There are/were microblogging platforms that let you write a line or post an image.

[ddalex]

Like twitter?

[elastic_church]

> Now their running around as a chicken without a head.

And a massive stampede of advertisers and small businesses blowing their whole marketing spend on said chicken

No worries

[nixos]

>And a massive stampede of advertisers and small businesses blowing their whole marketing spend on said chicken

That's what newspaper execs said in the 90s

[elastic_church]

well yes, I would be excited to see everyone simultaneously realize they won't get an ROI on their adspend.

But that isn't the sentiment right now. Discoverability is really bad and one of the only solutions people can come up with are creepy targeted advertisements

[nihonde]

The fact that, even after applying all this technology and know-how, the ROI on ad spend is a black box with no meaningful metrics, and the spending vectors are based on sentiment tells me that advertising is not a safe long term foundation for revenue. At some point, someone is going to have to prove that the money is well spent.

[icebraining]

"I think if we could manage to analyze that expenditure of money we would find that a vast percentage of it, probably one-half, is entirely wasted." - Robert Ogden, 1898.

Yet it's still going, more than a century later.

[nihonde]

I don't disagree with your comment, but wouldn't you agree that the last thirty years have introduced an unprecedented technology environment for tracking ROI on advertising? It seems clear that a lack of incentives, not abilities, is what keeps this racket afloat. For that reason, I'm not so certain that it will be allowed to continue forever. Once advertisers get a taste of real ROI metrics, they'll drop the hand-waving platforms overnight. Biggest market opportunity of our age?

[ethbro]

Or in other words, "Nobody was ever fired for suggesting they buy from IBM."

In the absence of alternatives, marketing money goes to advertising.

[AJ007]

Mathematically I don't know if it is possible to eliminate all returns from ad spend market wide. Then again, negative interest rates should have been impossible.

Every trend I see points to greater ad reach. AR + automated transportation means the web expands from your phone to your surrounding. Regulatory intervention could just firewall behavioral targeting and e-commerce in to existing platforms, making Google, Facebook, and Amazon far more powerful.

[yoz-y]

More and more people are self selecting into facebook and the advertisers follow. Google could fight it, but they would probably lose. There is an order of magnitude more people capable and willing to use fb and twitter compared to blogger.

[nixos]

More and more are self selecting into facebook because it's where everyone is.

Everyone was on blogs ten years ago. Had Google kept up their product, people wouldn't need to leave.

[yoz-y]

I think that most of the people that are on facebook now were not "on the internet" at all ten years ago. Maybe as consumers, but not as content producers.

One could of course argue the value added by a typical facebook post, but let's not pretend that tens of millions of people were setting up blogs to keep their grandparents updated with pictures of their grandchildren.

Blogs are still here, I follow many of them and RSS is alive and kicking. Most people that had blogs before and produced long-form content are still there. The only problem is that the advertising well might go dry.

[manigandham]

Interesting comments but you seem to have an outdated view of the company. Google is an incredible advertising machine that is far from running around "without a head."

They have an immense amount of data, easily matching and beating Facebook, with control at every layer including Android, Chrome, Google Analytics, Maps, Gmail and more, while also running the adtech infrastructure for 90% of the web. Publishers like CNN are not big enough to have their own networks and are constantly fighting a losing battle where Google is controlling ever more of the adtech supply chain. Even NYTimes runs Google's ad stack.

Sites today are really only left with custom executions using their production talents which is seen in the rise of sponsored/branded content, and Google is already making inroads there.

Search will always exist and always be massive, just as the open web will always exist and continues to grow. There will not be a consolidation into a single walled-garden, what you're seeing with Facebook is just another cycle that was repeated in the past with AOL and others. And search is still one of the best performing channels and will continue to get a majority of ad dollars online.

Google is also ramping up their Cloud Platform and have already overtaken AWS in some areas. Cloud computing stands to be an even bigger revenue source than their entire current ad business so they are well poised for the future.

I wouldn't underestimate this company anytime soon. They might have missed social (although not as much as you think, see Youtube) but there is plenty of opportunity out there.

[hellofunk]

I don't understand how Blogger was a social network in the way FB is?

[f_allwein]

That's the idea here. If all your friends had blogs, they could easily create/ share content there the way they do on FB now. You could follow them in Google Reader, or any other RSS reader. Moreover, you could add content from news sites, most of which still offer RSS feeds.

[amelius]

But what if you want to share stuff only with friends, and not with the rest of the world?

[f_allwein]

True, that is not really covered in this scenario. Except Blogger gives you an option of whether or not to list your blog on search engines. I have a privat blog from before the FB era that is not listed, and does not show up on Google searches for my name. Although of course, I would not put any confidential information on there.

[amelius]

Well, of course it should allow my friends to search my blogs . Just not the rest of the world.

But I guess that if Blogger would be "open", so that other search engines could also index those blogs, then this whole scenario would not work (malignant search engines could expose everything to everybody). So my suspicion is that it would actually be quite hard (or at least require more research) to make an "open" version of facebook.

[ethbro]

The original post misses the visibility point.

To me, Twitter benefits from being public discourse and an open forum for replies. On the other side of the coin, Facebook benefits from being a private forum (as most people use it).

Solutions that don't facilitate these use cases aren't going to be successful. Understand why people chose the services they did (discounting network effect) and then try and build something to compete.

[dpandey]

And what if what you really wanted to share was a photo, or a comment, or an article from NYT or Vogue, and not a long piece of writing? Isn't that what most of Facebook is used for?

[amelius]

On Facebook, one at least has some protection against outsiders searching for their name and finding one's "silly" (careless) postings. If all posts were open, no such protection would exist. I think this could be a real barrier for widespread adoption of this approach.

[posterboy]

a blog is a webbed personal log with comments and the core functionality fb offers is just that, a simple to set up homepage? Blogs have a blogroll instead of a friendlist, does that make a big difference? Seriously asking, I don't use the latter.

[nixos]

All it lacked was a built-in phpbb forum (FB groups)

[hellofunk]

Well the interface and way of sharing and communicating with people is totally different, so I am surprised to see them compared.

[posterboy]

>the way of communicating with people is totally different

lol u srs? j/k <3

[douche]

At one point, Blogger was as much a social network as Tumblr is now. At least, I think I remember that; it was about a decade ago now.

[sparkzilla]

I think you mean that Google killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. But then it turns into a chicken with no head. Make you mind up, man!