A couple of days ago I finally decided to join Google+, which – at the day of this writing – is still in a sort of semi-closed test phase. You need to find somebody who is already on Google+ and convince him or her to send you an invitation. For anybody working in a field related to social media this is more of an annoyance than an actual barrier of entry. As almost all current Google+ users I got a friend of mine to send me an invitation. Now I am part of the game.
If Google starts a new service it is always a good idea to take a closer look even though the history of Google startups is a lot more mixed than most people will admit. (Anybody still remembers the once hyped Google Wave?) But the enormous market power of Google will make anything that has some sort of mass appeal instantly successful on a very large scale. Any Google activity therefore justifies close observation by anybody interested in any topic related to any form of media.
The first thing a Google+ novice learns is that Google+ organizes the world in circles. If you know somebody (or not) you can add him or her in one of your circles for following his or her activities in a more or less neatly organized manner. These circles are not public but if you want, you can allow public access to a list of all people you have in your circles. If you are new to Google+ you will most likely sort through some of these lists in search of people you might know. At least that is what I did.
What I found interesting is that whatever circled people list I sorted through, I frequently came across the same people scattered around in many circles. It was almost as if the Google+ world consisted of a rather limited amount of people connected by a rather large amount of circles. On second thought, this was not particularly surprising since the user invitation process within the test phase is somehow expected to result in such a selection.
People currently on Google+ (like myself) joined for the purpose of joining. They use Google+ for the purpose of talking about Google+. It is the group of people that tend to post for the purpose of posting and more or less frequently comment for the purpose of commenting. It is also the group of people that is believed to know exactly what people want in a social network. Nothing could be further from the truth, though (no offence, I include myself in that list).
The success of Facebook does not come from the participation of social media experts neither was it planned by social media experts. It results from the emergent use by average users that are not really interested in the social media platform itself but rather by what you can do with it. So I decided to ask two experts in this non-scientific everyday social media usage – my kids – about what they think about Google+. They took about 30 seconds and came back with a very clear evaluation: “No games – no good!”
It seems that Google+ started with the wrong test group and the wrong set of features (a much needed API does not yet exist but is said to be in development) for optimizing mass market appeal in an iterative product development process. Looking back, this points to a problem that many recent Google products had. A very closed test group of social media experts created a hype that the actual product was not able to live up to because average users could not care less about expert opinions. At the moment I see no reason why this should be any different with Google+.