Google’s latest effort to address its weak spot is decidedly me-too.
Eric Schmidt/Getty Images
It was a remarkably frank admission from the man who Google made a billionaire. “I screwed up,” Eric Schmidt admitted last week as he reflected on Google’s lack of answers to the runaway success of Facebook and its domination of the social networking space.
Schmidt – who stepped down as the search giant’s chief executive a couple of months ago after a decade of providing “adult supervision” to Google’s brilliant young founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page – helped build what is arguably the most influential company of the new millennium.
But he totally missed the boat on social networking, failing to mobilise his software engineers to meet the threat posed by Facebook despite raising his own concerns within the company.
“I did nothing about the memos I wrote,” Schmidt, who received a US$100 million parting gift from Google, told the influential All Things Digital conference in California. “I was busy,” he explained.
Having helped serve up game-changing services like Google Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Google Street View and the Android operating system that powers millions of smart phones and tablet computers, Schmidt can perhaps be forgiven for his misstep.
In fact, many internet users who see social networking as a complete waste of time will be thankful Google’s services have been largely sheltered from the endless inane chatter of Facebook and Twitter. Google’s products seem decidedly mature in comparison.
Nevertheless, Google’s weak spot is its lack of integration with these increasingly powerful and popular platforms, and the company’s botched efforts to socialise itself account for the few serious blunders it has made in recent years.
As a Google convert, I eagerly anticipated Google Wave, the real-time messaging service launched in 2009 that was supposed to meld email and instant messaging. Enthusiastic early reviews petered out as it became apparent how frustrating it was to use as you started interacting with increasing numbers of people. The wave soon became a tsunami of information. Overwhelmed, I gave up.
The same went for Google Buzz, a social networking tool integrated into Google’s free webmail service, Gmail. Buzz lets you share web links, photos, videos and Facebook-like status updates that are visible in the inboxes of your friends.
I turned Buzz off a few months after it debuted in 2010, annoyed by the way it cluttered up my inbox. Buzz’s privacy violations sparked outrage and were the nail in the coffin.
Google’s latest social networking effort, +1, is a version of Facebook’s hugely influential “Like” system, which has come to indicate the popularity of content all across the web.
Google’s twist is that it will build user feedback on websites into the Google search results of those in your network of contacts. Essentially, it means that your friends’ and contacts’ tastes can play a role in the type of search results Google serves up.
The +1 badge will start appearing on websites alongside Facebook’s “Like” icon and the retweet badge popular among Twitter followers looking to flag interesting websites and articles.
For a company used to leading the way, +1 is decidedly me-too and lacks the social network at its centre, which is what makes Facebook’s Like feature so successful.
So how do you trump Facebook? You can’t buy that sort of success; otherwise Microsoft would be the coolest tech company in the world. You could cosy up to Facebook and, indeed, Schmidt did try. But Facebook wasn’t interested, instead opting for a deal with Microsoft and linkages with its Bing search engine.
The only way forward is to out-innovate Facebook, and no one is better placed than Google to pull it off. Larry Page knows that. He has stepped into the chief executive role and is linking the financial incentives of his executives to the progress the company makes in socialising itself.
But he needs to understand that each social networking failure erodes Google’s ability to pull off a Facebook-like success and tests the faith of those of us in the Google camp waiting for the social killer app that will allow us to bid Facebook farewell.
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