Why Google+ might do better than Wave, Buzz, Orkut....

Why I believe Google+ will succeed where all the other social networks tried by Google haven’t
Google+ has been making the rounds these days, the funny thing being people apart from the techie circle have actually grasped it, seen it, played around with it. From most accounts, it seems eons better than what Google came up with before, whether it can take down the reigning duopoly at the top is another question. However, I’d like to try and drive into why it may become successful.

There has been a lot of emphasis on social networking in Mountain View these days, so much so that Google employees had their bonuses linked to it and Google’s accomplishment in that field. It seems that’s how much of a threat Facebook and Twitter were being perceived as. And so you could say, if you pour enough dollars into something, sooner or later, you’re going to hit gold. But I think there was something different this time around.

It seemed a bit like, in the last three or four years before the step-down of Eric Schmidt, Google had seemed to believe in its own hype about itself. That they were amazing, awesome, that they had reached the top, and were just going to dominate from now on. Then what can happen, the drive to innovate and create dies down a bit, you get into a comfort zone, or you start to believe you’re too big to fail. One thinks that Vista was such an example. That is why Wave, and Buzz were just unleashed on the world, there was no measured approach, it was just “this is awesome, and people WILL like it, because we’re Google”. This time around, much more measured, much more cautious, and the product seems to be much more, for a word, ‘developed’. One is reminded of the Gmail launch, when Hotmail was running dominant, and it looked like no one could touch it, when little by little, people switched over to Gmail and then massed.

To go back to the thought of the fare this time being more developed, one only has to see that Google Wave and Buzz were good ideas however one believes that’s just what they were, ideas. No thought had really, or it felt like no or very little thought had really been put into how they were going to fit into the existing ecosystem. Whereas, with Google+ one gets the feeling, the developers/programmers have sat down, and come up with a list of why Facebook/Twitter are popular, and their weak points, and then figured how to improve upon it. There seems to be a definite USP to Google+, if someone asks you why I should I switch. You can say something apart from “because it’s made by Google, and by definition, it’s great,” there are actual cogent reasons for why you should/could switch. Something that Mac users rarely provide but we’re getting off the point.

So, in summary, Google’s social prowess seems to be growing. Too early to say whether this is IT or not, but they seem to be going about it in the right way.