[sharan]

An astute article.

"Understanding those concepts is not easy. It takes lots of practice, and lots of patience, and lots of learning."

I think that's an important precis of the article. Google's engineers are used to designing and doing what's "right". They inherited the concept of search and have built a sophisticated algorithm around that established notion same with mail and their more successful products.

Social on the other hand is a fuzzy science, it's hard to know what works and why ahead of time. It's much easier to do it in hindsight, but by then it's too late.