Tag Archives: gmail

10 Reasons Why Google’s Social Network May Fail (Again)

I have been playing with Google Plus for about a week and read many comments and discussions about it. I also posted some comments myself. I believe there are a few reasons why Google+ may fail, and I am really concerned about privacy:

1-      Google Plus’ beta testing is lasting for too long. Invites do not really work and you also have to consider the frustration of those who get an email from the system – after their friends shared something- and still cannot get in. It’s been open since a week already for beta. It’s Google.. isn’t a week too long?

2-      It does look like too much like Facebook, yet not behaving like that (it’s more like a mix between Facebook and Twitter), and it’s far more complicated than Facebook.

3-     No iPhone app available yet. The choice of launching such a global service before an iPhone app was ready has not been a good choice. You cannot ignore 40M users (this is the number of daily users of the Facebook for iPhone app, according to Facebook’s data). We are in the mobile era. A good thing would have been maybe to open G+ in preview to Android users only.

4-      There are serious privacy concerns about how content is shared – very similar to twitter- and how it (may) appear on search engines. Google+ says in its privacy policy ” be aware that when you share something through Google+, anyone who received it may share it with others”. Wow. Really?

5-      Google’s apps are not integrated with G+, while they are almost all integrated into the black navigation bar – too bad you get G+ notifications, but you don’t get those from Gmail or other apps. So what’s the point of having them all? Just for their use maybe?

6-      It took over 5 years for Facebook to become what it is today. We go there because all our friends are there. We are used to it. Like it or not, I think it’s absolutely useful and cool. It cannot take just a few weeks or months for G+ to beat it.

7-      Facebook is what it is because users wanted it. G+ is pushing its own Facebook because they want it.

8-      G+ didn’t tell us why we should move to G+. We know why of course, but I mean they did not provide us with a good reason for it.

9-      It looks like it’s been created for users that are younger than those who spend the majority of time on Facebook (over 35). Younger generations do not spend a lot of money on websites and not a lot of time on brands pages, interacting with them, unless they are related to music and fun. And there’s no music app on Google.

10-  And, more important: It will not take long to realize how seriously we should worry about our privacy. Consider how bad is having Google gathering too much information about us: they already know our search habits and what we are looking for (they are the most used search engine), they know our browsing habits (don’t forget they have Google Analytics for a large majority of WW websites!) and they know our company’s website analytics and our banners performance (who clicks on our banners), and they host our office documents, they host our Gmail emails (those we use to register to all newsletters and websites, hence they know what happens to open rate and click through), and so on. They just missed a piece: how we get there, who are we influenced by and who we can influence. Now, with Circles, they will know this. How much will this mean in terms of advertising and marketing dollars? In the meantime, Facebook is protecting our privacy against Google’s attacks.

 

 

Google+ vs Facebook: Is It Just About Social Network?

Taking advantage of the LinkedOut situation this morning (LinkedIn returned a 500 error), I managed to spend some time on Google+.

The move about having users being able to get on G+ only by invitation it’s surely been a nice marketing move. And the fact that LinkedIn was not working today, has been a fortunate coincidence. Let’s see now if G+ will work. I am curious to see if there has been any drop in Facebook traffic in these days, after G+ launched, or if there will be more drop in the US GDP once G+ will get bigger.

I still think one of the most interesting differentiating factors of G+ is “Circle+”. Interesting enough, it took less time to have an app (which also grants visibility to its source code) making Facebook have this same funcionality than it took to Google to open its doors to users.

Here are my initial thoughts about G+, summarized by section:

click to enlarge

G+ and Privacy: isn’t Google going to know too much about us?

[more about this can be found in this more recent post here]

We heard already about some concerns about privacy settings on Google. And I am sure we all remember about all the issues facebook went through during its 7 years, with regard to privacy.

As a start, here are the available Privacy settings on G+ as of today, 7/1/2011 (I am sure they will change them=:

Someone sees this Google move as a way to compete with Twitter, rather than with Facebook. Personally, I don’t see Google+ as a way to take either of the two (Twitter and Facebook) out of the Social Networks game.I see Google becoming more and more the owner of our data, our identity, and becoming the most powerful marketing weapon.

Surely, many of those who claim to be sick of Facebook – mainly because of the fact they don’t like their life to be so visible to their friends- will be happy they will have another option. But I am not sure those who tell they are sick of having others knowing so much about them will be happy to share even more.

Companies who turned their marketing dollars into Facebook will like this G+ even more than those who were hoping for a decline of Facebook.

Talking about marketing, I haven’t seen any ads (so far). I am sure the drop in banner clicks, as also reported in a recently published article, wasn’t a big surprise to Google, who knows basically everything about almost every website, if we consider the traffic that goes through its search engine, its emails, its analytics and its adwords, to mention a few. Surely we should not forget about other apps like docs and chats. Do they keep a copy of all our data?

Consider this: Google knows all banners performance for a huge number of companies, knows their website traffic, from and to inside pages and other websites. But what Google was missing, and why Google – IMHO- was keen to enter the social media market, is “who” was performing these actions, what are the habits of “clickers”, what is what today is called “digital body language”.

The social side of the equation was Google’s missing link for the ads battle. This is how Facebook started making the big bucks (I am referring to the deal with Microsoft). So now the game is not about Social Media – or at least not only. And I would expect some news to come up from Microsoft and its ads network.

What’s your opinion? Who is going to win this marketing battle?