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Google's Social Strategy

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11–20 of 44 posts

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#11
Two comments on Google's focussing on social.

First - Bonuses? For many developers bonuses are not motivators, or not as great a motivator, as ego boosting recognition. (Don't have sources for this at hand).

Second - Social is what Facebook does/is. It is not a secondary goal, a necessity in a strategic space. For example, there was Google notebook. It withered, but evernote keeps going. Notes everywhere is what evernote does/is.

We've seen this play before: a company becomes dominant in a particular field, upstarts are innovating elsewhere, dominant company chooses to respond. Film at 11.

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#12
Facebook has so much momentum, it's hard to imagine anyone competing with them head-on. X will stay on Facebook because that's where [A, B, C] are, and B isn't going to switch because that's where......

I would guess that the only way to compete against Facebook is to target smaller, more specialized kinds of social and try to bring them together. Also, they need to focus on under-served markets (women, emerging markets, elderly). If they can get to these before Facebook does, they'll create the same kind of momentum.

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#13
I tend to believe it's not a race anymore, and having a strategy is the start of the end. Google should utilize it's manpower on something visionary.

I guess I wait for the time, Neal Stephenson's metaverse becomes reality. With all the expertise in gmaps, search and scale, add some kinect to the mix, and buy second life for a change, and you could get very close.

Create a new exciting virtual place/space, and the crowd will show up. I can only hope they are working on something good. Just another gmail feature, or some +1 clutter in my search window will not fix this. Google was never the fun place on the web, only a tool to get a job done, and with every year, that brand become more of burden to even enter anything social.

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#14
post #13

I tend to believe it's not a race anymore, and having a strategy is the start of the end. Google should utilize it's manpower on something visionary. I guess I wait for the time, Neal Stephenson's metaverse becomes reality. With all the expertise in gmaps, search and scale, add some kinect to the mix, and buy second life for a change, and you could get very close. Create a new exciting virtual place/space, and the cr…

Why is it not a race anymore? Even if you're Hussein Bolt, the race is still on: set new records, challenge others, show boat. And why is "having a strategy the start of the end"? You seem to imply that it isn't because Google's strategy is flawed, but that having any kind of strategy is a sign of the end times. Surely all organizations, even a colony of bacteria, will need a strategy.

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#15
post #5
post #4

> Facebook has become the primary place web users spend their time and create content, and is mostly closed to Google’s crawlers. Seriously? I'm yet to see any of my facebook friends to create anything interesting that google can't crawl. Every single artistic person I know has a blog or a website. Maybe it's just my friends, but the most creative thing they do is post a link from reddit or some crappy photo from a p…

Facebook doesn't let you input enough information to do anything creative. I would never, ever write a blog post on my facebook, then link people to it. Can you even do that? I would never, ever post anything other than cellphone snapshots into facebook, their photo UI seems to discourage it as a photograph sharing tool (snapshot sharing yes, but I don't know anybody that would ditch flickr for facebook). Can you upl…

Yeah you can write a "note". But it sucks, closed to people who don't have FB accounts, and, depending on your settings, possibly closed to people who aren't your friend.

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#16
post #5
post #4

> Facebook has become the primary place web users spend their time and create content, and is mostly closed to Google’s crawlers. Seriously? I'm yet to see any of my facebook friends to create anything interesting that google can't crawl. Every single artistic person I know has a blog or a website. Maybe it's just my friends, but the most creative thing they do is post a link from reddit or some crappy photo from a p…

Facebook doesn't let you input enough information to do anything creative. I would never, ever write a blog post on my facebook, then link people to it. Can you even do that? I would never, ever post anything other than cellphone snapshots into facebook, their photo UI seems to discourage it as a photograph sharing tool (snapshot sharing yes, but I don't know anybody that would ditch flickr for facebook). Can you upl…

I have a fair few less tech savvy Facebook friends who do indeed use FB Notes as a "blog" - one that people not logged into FB can't even see.

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#17
Rather than build a site where users go to, I think Google should do for the Internet what Microsoft did for desktops and focus on helping developers to 1) easily build sites that users love and 2) make money. Google already does this with app engine, adsense, oauth, maps, youtube, checkout, android, site search, etc, but it can do more.

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#18
Actually, it is essential for Facebook to have its content crawl-able by everyone - which is why there is the constant push towards downplaying privacy. A quick look at Facebook on both Compete and Alexa says that they get ~8% of their referral traffic from Google alone (the search engine is also their largest referral traffic source) and the Google properties together contribute referral traffic in double digit percentages.

"Social" itself is not a product. It is almost like gasoline - by itself either product does not give you any value, but use it as a fuel or an enabler and it takes on a different form. Facebook's enablement is primarily through connections (the gateway drug) and later it transforms itself into a tool to easily eat up plenty of your time at varying levels of interaction/engagement. As much as Google wants to tap into these primary and secondary objectives now owned by Facebook, Facebook itself would want to move beyond these two.

Facebook has to eventually become the arbiter of transactions online, which has to be a full-on solution than the teetotaler approach taken on FB credits. That would, though, expose Facebook to higher standards on privacy. But, if they manage that, Google can be easily overrun.

For Google, "social" cannot be force-fed. "+1" is such an eyesore and is such a horrible effort at branding your social interaction touchpoint for the masses.

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#19
post #4

> Facebook has become the primary place web users spend their time and create content, and is mostly closed to Google’s crawlers. Seriously? I'm yet to see any of my facebook friends to create anything interesting that google can't crawl. Every single artistic person I know has a blog or a website. Maybe it's just my friends, but the most creative thing they do is post a link from reddit or some crappy photo from a p…

He's not talking about creative people, he's talking about Normals. For most people a link from Reddit or a party photo is all the content creation they do. Besides which, the aggregation and social filtering from what my friends' "like" or "retweet" is actually a great source for content.

Re: Google's Social Strategy

#20
post #4

> Facebook has become the primary place web users spend their time and create content, and is mostly closed to Google’s crawlers. Seriously? I'm yet to see any of my facebook friends to create anything interesting that google can't crawl. Every single artistic person I know has a blog or a website. Maybe it's just my friends, but the most creative thing they do is post a link from reddit or some crappy photo from a p…

The interesting data in Facebook is not the creative (or lack thereof) data. It's the relationships, demographics, interests, mundane activity, etc.
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