Google has learnt its lessons and is on a path to consolidation. It has finally realised that Google Buzz, was a bummer and has decided to shut it down. Other notable products that are going along with this are : Jaiku (acquired in 2007), iGoogle’s social features and Code Search.
Google VP of Product Bradley Horowitz writes on the Google Blog:
Changing the world takes focus on the future, and honesty about the past. We learned a lot from products like Buzz, and are putting that learning to work every day in our vision for products like Google+. Our users expect great things from us; today’s announcements let us focus even more on giving them something truly awesome.
What has Google learned from these products’ failure?
Horowitz states that privacy as a feature was the core philosophy which went into designing of Circles, a part of Google+. This has come after a fiasco in Buzz, where it revealed everyone you emailed with frequently the identity of others you emailed with frequently. Not good, especially if you have stalkers.
Jaiku, a product that had been with Google since 2007, was quite similar to Twitter. Only if the company had realised what they had and not wasted their time with Buzz. Instead they chose to make the founding team work on other doomed social projects (Wave, Buzz). While much of what Jaiku offered has been successfully integrated into Google+, it has been quite late in coming.
All these lessons are fine, but has Google truly understood social engineering?
Many have questioned the actual goal of Google entering the social space. Google’s strengths lie in data engineering, then why is a company, trying again and again something which it has repeatedly failed?
Former Google employee, Doug Edwards, shared the company’s true aim:
It’s not because they enjoy warm and fuzzy social interaction and they think oh, this would be a really wonderful way to bring our friends together and build a social circle. I think they take a much more calculated view of the value of the data they cannot get if they do not have a social network that is widely used. I think that scares them.
So if Doug is right about Google’s vision, apparently, Google is aiming to harvest that vast amount of user generated information and use it to sell products back to you. What an irony! You are being used to identify what you would like to buy, based upon all that you share!
It is quite admirable how hard Google is trying to make Google+ a success: streamlining its products, integrating the services and focusing on the core products, one can only hope that they get it right this time around. Google+ has around 40 million users as of now, but people have rejected it and are no more active on it, as seen on Twitter and Facebook.
What Google really needs now is a rethink, merely approaching this an engineering problem is not going to help.
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