| I think his point is that Google made + so that they can learn about people. It's designed to serve Google's need to learn about people and damage it's competitors first and foremost. Vic Gundotra is quite open about this when he talks about how he drove the team using fear of the competition as a motivator. You're right that Facebook is now just as much about trying to monetize as it is about serving its users, but the OP is pointing out that Facebook started off serving its users, and that's how it grew. Twitter is similar in this respect. They both started off serving user needs and are now trying to transition into profitable businesses. Google + is fundamentally (as Gundotra says) about serving Google's needs, and the product design is about finding a user need that enables it to do this. I don't agree with the OP that it's doomed to fail. I don't particularly like Google's business model alignment, but I'm happy with how they make it work for search, so why not social? It seems to me that there are decades worth of opportunities in this area. The biggest reasons I can see for it failing are: 1. It's too much like Facebook - we don't need another Facebook we've already got one - and as for people disliking Facebook, how is it going to be different just because it's got a Google logo on it? 2. The mental model is too complex. I know what I'm getting with Twitter, so I can trust it. I don't trust Facebook - but frankly Facebook is an entertainment platform to most people, so trust isn't the biggest issue. Google+ is complex but more important, even if I understood all the logic behind it I still couldn't form a good mental model of it because that depends on tacit human behavior which hasn't yet formed. All that said, it's nicely engineered and clean looking, which makes me willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and try it for a bit to see if it does make my life better in some way (which twitter does, but Facebook does not). |