Google Minus: Google keeps backing all the wrong social products

The Great Google+ Purge is officially underway. The social network isn't dead, but the plan to make Google+ the "social backbone" of Google is. After integrating Google+ with just about everything in the Google Ecosystem, Google's social strategy has "pivoted" and Google+ will now be de-integrated out of everything. Google+ will be left to stand alone as a (probably niche) social stream.

Google+ was, in a word, "forced." It was forced not only into products and on users but onto the rest of the company, too. In 2011, for instance, Larry Page famously tied all employee bonuses to the company's success in social. It was easy to see why Page decided to do this at the time: Facebook was big and growing and scary. What if people stopped using search and just asked their friends for websites and product recommendations?

With a fear-powered, top-down mandate and every employee having a vested interest in Google+, the social network got shoehorned into every Google product. Google+ showed up in Search, Android, Google Maps, YouTube, Google Play, and many others.

Google+ certainly isn't the first social Google product, but it is the latest in a long line of social failures that the company still doesn't seem to have learned from. It's not that Google can't build great social products—it can—it just continually misjudges which of its social products are good (or even which of its products are social) and therefore deserve the company's focus. Google's social past seems to follow a pattern: throw resources behind social products few people want and try to compel adoption, while neglecting the social products people do want.

Google Buzz

Google+ was a continuation of the strategy that Google first pioneered with Google Buzz: generate the "network effect" with brute force. The company took something users were already using—Gmail—and integrated it with Google Buzz. Overnight, Google had millions of "Buzz users," which must look like a big win for a numbers-obsessed manager.

Google Buzz, besides being a social network itself, was supposed to be a social media content aggregator. It would take a firehose of tweets and Facebook posts and funnel them into a single feed. Buzz was supposed to be able to pick out the "interesting" social updates, so rather than an endless flood of posts, only the best would be curated by algorithm.

Buzz made some crazy assumptions about user privacy during initial setup, and it never really recovered from the backlash. Buzz would detect your top e-mail contacts and auto-follow them, giving these people access to shared Google Reader items and public Picasa photos. Not every e-mail contact is a "friend," though, so this had a lot of predictably terrible side effects. Bosses got access to things employees would rather they didn't see, and one woman even had Buzz connect with her abusive ex-husband.

Google killed Buzz after about two years.

Google Reader—Beloved social news reader

Contrast Buzz with Google Reader—the Web-based RSS reader that Google murdered in 2013. This was sort of a social network. At least, it was in 2011 before all the social features were gutted in favor of Google+. There were profiles and a friends list. You could share things, make lists, and follow people. You could comment on new stories, and there was even a "Like" button. The site felt like Twitter but with full news articles instead of just links. Some users had more than 7,500 followers.

Dear Google: taking away my Google Reader functionality will not make me use Google+. It will only make me mad. Kthxbai. Love, Megan

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) October 31, 2011

People loved Google Reader. Today, when Internet companies make people mad they sign petitions from the comfort of their computer desk. For Google Reader, there were literal protesters with picket signs outside of Google's offices.

Google understood it needed the network effect to make Google+ successful, but somehow the company twisted that into the idea that "only this social network can exist" and all others inside Google must be destroyed or Borged into the Google+ collective. The network effect relies on people actually liking the service.

Google doesn't always seem to get the "choice" part of social networking. Google doesn't get to pick the social networks, the users do, and if social is important to the company, it needs to listen, react, and improve the social networks people actually like. 

With Google+, Google lost sight of the big picture. The company was so preoccupied with killing other social features to make way for Google+ that it never stopped to think about the damage it was doing. Now that the "social backbone" strategy has failed, Google doesn't have either a successful social platform or any of the social products it killed to make way for Google+. In social, the company is probably worse off than before Google+ started.

Google Hangouts—Neglecting the hottest area in social networking

Instant messaging is the hottest area of social networking right now. Facebook knows it—the social leader acquired the instant messaging client WhatsApp for an astounding $16 billion last year, and that was just to augment its existing instant messaging lineup. While WhatsApp is the most popular instant messaging client out there with 700 million users, Facebook Messenger is the second most popular with 600 million users. Snapchat, another instant messaging app, was recently valued at $15 billion dollars. If you're into social, instant messaging is the place to be.

Even with the pivot of Google+, Google continues to demonstrate it has no idea how to build a social presence or correctly allocate resources to products users actually want to use. Google has an instant messaging client. It's called Google Hangouts. For many people Hangouts is their most-used application. On Android it not only handles Google's Hangouts-to-Hangouts communication, but it can send SMSes, too. Like Reader, it's social, and users love it—or at least want to love it. While everyone else on Earth seems to realize how important instant messaging is, and thus throws tons of resources and billions of dollars behind IM, Google's in-house solution feels like one of the most unimportant and poorly backed products at the company.

Google Hangouts is so poorly supported that making fun of it has practically become a meme in the Android community. The app was one of the last to get a Material redesign, and users regularly complain about the lack of features and integration with other Google products. Google regularly releases Hangouts features on iOS first, leaving Android users to question which device has the better Google ecosystem. As of this writing, Google Hangouts' more recent "big version" update—4.0—has been exclusive to iOS for a full month. In fact, iOS has already updated a second time, to version 4.1, while Google's Android users are stuck on 3.3. Google only says Hangouts 4.0 is coming for Android "soon."

One engineer on the Hangouts team even acknowledged the team's reputation in the community, writing on reddit, "Unlike what the /r/Android subreddit says, the Hangouts team does come to work every morning." This is how bad Hangouts has gotten—Android users publicly question if a full-time Hangouts team even exists. Meanwhile, leading social networking companies are pouring billions and billions of dollars into competing IM platforms.

Imagine if Google threw the resources that Google+ had at Hangouts or invested anything close to the ~$16 billion everyone else thinks instant messaging is worth? Hangouts should be a flagship Google product on par with Search, Chrome, or Android. There should be a massive development team that constantly releases new features, responds to user feedback, and maintains world-class clients for every imaginable platform. It should be a pillar of the Google ecosystem. Hangouts is the social product from Google that people actually want, but Google refuses to invest in it.

Not quite dead?

Google seems to desperately want to succeed at social, and watching it completely mismanage what could be a social juggernaut has been frustrating for users. There's clear demand for a good product here. Even the Hangouts complaints are a sign of passion; you don't complain about a product you don't use. Yet the improvements never really come. Feedback rarely seems taken into consideration.

Google's social future looks more unclear than ever. Google+ isn't dead; the company has said it will be kept around as a standalone social stream, but the site seems like it will never grow beyond a niche service. Does Google try to take another big swing at social with a third "social first" service? Does it try to buy one of the established sites, like Twitter? Does Google even feel it needs to be in social anymore?

You can never "make" people like your social site, so hopefully Google's next foray into social will begin with improving the services people actually like and use already.

Listing image by eCreative IM Blog