Adam Fields (work stuff)

How Google should approach Social

After several false starts, Google is looking to turn over a new leaf and hire a brand new “head of social” to define their social strategy. Yes, I have a lot of critical things to say about Google, but I think it’s an interesting exercise to think about how they could unseat Facebook. So here are some random unorganized thoughts about how Google should approach their social problem.

I think Google has failed with these previous attempts because the social web is at its core vastly different from anything that Google has done before, and this is also what’s plaguing Facebook as well, which wants to be more like Google. In short, social sharing isn’t the same as public sharing. When I write something in a public forum, I want as many people as possible to read it. In that kind of a forum, Google can make more money if more people see it, as can Facebook (which is why Facebook is trying to turn their entire platform into a more public one). This is at odds with what the users want for social, which is controlled sharing among a very small group. There is certainly an aspect of making new friends and extending one’s social circle outwards, but the object here is generally to share only inside that circle, and people tend to resist being forced or coerced by the platform to share more widely. (Or at least they say they do - whether or not people will take any discrete action and continue to buckle under the shift-to-public onslaught or accept the changing standards remains to be seen).

Of course, this is completely flipped around for commercial entities, which can use the perceived intimacy of social sites to make it seem like they’re getting closer to their customers whether or not they actually are. Their goal remains a public one - to get as many people as possible to view their content, buy their products, and in some cases give them feedback. (The question of whether and what kinds of companies actually want any user feedback is a completely different one).

Question number one is, of course, what do the users want out of social web software? Of course different people are going to want different features, but there’s a core set that defines the social web. People generally want to:

1. Say who their friends are, and maybe categorize them
2. Send individual messages to their friends
3. Send broadcast “status” updates to their friends
4. Share media (primarily pictures and videos)
5. Comment and give feedback on what other people are doing
6. Interact in some way with people who are not their friends
7. Play games
8. Invite people to events

(Secondarily, there are a number of features that have been attached to the social web in order to try to extend its influence, but which users may or may not care too much about (yet):

1. Single signon to other services
2. Personalization of other services
3. Commerce integration
4. Platform integration (apps)

These are likely to be more about the second phase, after people are comfortable with Google in a social role.)

The utility of social services is entirely dependent on the rest of the membership. Facebook is popular for two reasons: 1) Everybody’s on it, and 2) There isn’t anything better yet. They got in early with the latter, and eventually reached a popularity tipping point of membership to the extent that another service that comes along that competes on better features won’t have any effect until it also eclipses Facebook on the ability to reach everyone of consequence. The first priority here has to be that everybody’s on it on day one, but Google already has that advantage - lots of people already use Google services.

Google is in a much better position than most other companies to take down Facebook, but they need to keep in mind the defining characteristic of the feature set - it’s not just about bells and whistles, it’s also vitally important to understand the biggest differentiators between public web services and social web services, i.e.: selective sharing and trust. The absolute most important property that a social system must have is that whatever you share through it remains only shared with the recipients intended by the sender. Google is very good at “public”, and it seems to be pretty good at “secret”, but it’s not so good at understanding the distinction between those two and “private”.

I think the correct approach here is pretty simple:

1. Let people do stuff.
2. And share it.
3. And most importantly - don’t share it with anybody (everybody) unless they explicitly want to.

It doesn’t have to be much more complicated than that. Google already has an expansive suite of tools for online content creation with many users, and social interaction doesn’t have to be a new application, but should be pervasively added to those individual services. Google’s social strategy should be about tying all of their applications together in a way that lets the individual users of each of them share what they’re already working on in a way that corresponds to their circles of friends. To make this easier, there might need to be some new aspects to the applications in managing sharing sharing, but that should be more about making it easy to centralize settings, preferences, and the history of what you’ve shared with whom. The crux of the matter is how to organize those tools so that users don’t feel like they’re being aggressively marketed to, and to keep the focus on letting people share their work with their friends instead of constantly pushing to share with the world at large. A more open approach may be better for Google, and users may want to go that way in the long term, but the user’s needs ultimately have to come first.