Google Wants Everything and Will Probably Get It
It had to happen eventually. We cycled through MySpace like it was a phase—and it was—took Facebook to bed every night for years, and now Google has decided it’s their turn. Google+ launched in closed beta this summer, positioned as the social network that finally fixes what Facebook got wrong, the product that Orkut was supposed to be and Google Wave spectacularly wasn’t: a mass-market community that makes genuine sense to use.
I’ll be honest: I believe Facebook won’t last forever. Zuckerberg can greenlight as many movies about his own origin story as he wants; the blue supernetwork will age out eventually, and we’ll find some new digital habit to be embarrassed about in a decade. The question is always whether the replacement is genuinely better or just newer.
Google+ is built on the reasonable observation that Facebook’s all-or-nothing privacy model is a structural disaster. Circles let you sort contacts into separate groups—bosses in one, the people you’d actually tell things to in another—and share accordingly. Sparks is a content feed supposed to surface things you actually care about. Hangouts is video chat with multiple people at once, which sounds useful until you remember that coordinating multiple people is the oldest unsolved problem in human civilization. Taken together, it’s coherent. Thoughtful, even. The demo videos carry the standard technology-makes-everything-better energy—slick, slightly dishonest, weirdly persuasive.
What makes me uneasy isn’t whether Google+ works. It’s that Google already holds my email, my search history, my location, my calendar. Giving them my social graph on top of all that feels like a decision that deserves more than a shrug. I know that’s a privacy concern dressed in practical language. I also know Google doesn’t particularly care how I feel about it.
The more interesting question is whether this becomes another Orkut—briefly celebrated, quickly abandoned, eventually a cautionary footnote—or whether Google has finally figured out what makes something people want to actually live inside. My instinct is that the features are right but the feeling isn’t there yet. Social networks don’t succeed because they’re well-designed; they succeed because using them feels like being somewhere real. Google+ feels like a very good product. That’s not the same thing at all.