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Google Plus meets with early successJul 20, 2011 (San Jose Mercury News - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- Three weeks after Google (GOOG) unveiled its latest effort to challenge Facebook and Twitter, the Internet giant says a key element of its high-stakes social networking gamble is paying off. The company doesn't mean membership -- even though Google+ has soared far past 10 million people, and according to one estimate may have doubled during the past week to 20 million. Rather, it's the way people are sharing information, which is at the heart of Google's strategy to differentiate itself from other social networks. Google bet that people would rush to share comments, photos, video and other content with distinct groups of friends, called Circles, and it appears to be panning out, according to internal company data. That is different from Facebook and Twitter, where for most people, any post goes to everyone's followers or friends. Google's recent past is littered with high-profile social networking flops, including Orkut, Wave and Buzz. The new social network ranks as one of the most important product launches in the company's history as it tries to catch up with the booming success of 750-million member Facebook and other social sites, and the threat they represent to Google's advertising business. Google+ is the centerpiece of a company-wide master plan to reboot Google for a modern Web that is increasingly about connecting with people as well as information. While the numbers for Google+ are impressive, "We're Google. We can get anybody to kick the tires of a product," said Vic Gundotra, the Internet giant's top social networking executive. "It doesn't mean it's going to be successful." Sitting with colleague Bradley Horowitz in Building 2000 on the Googleplex, where they assembled the team in June 2010 to build the product that Silicon Valley universally agreed just wasn't in Google's DNA, the two executives talked about the leap of faith they made, even amid doubts within Google that they were on the right track. "Was it clear people were going to use Circles,when the overwhelming evidence says that people don't disaggregate their friends into lists? Why do you believe it's going to be successful this time?" Gundotra said, remembering the questions they faced. "What do you do when there are internal people that don't believe in that? It's challenging, but it's incredibly gratifying when some or most of those things pay off. But, we're very early on." Experts agree it's too soon to call the social network a hit, even though its popularity helped push Google stock up 13 percent last week. Indeed, Facebook added 250 million members in the year Google+ was being designed. "Until it really starts to go mainstream, and I see my cousin in Florida decide to get on it, I just don't think we can say it's a success. We've got a ways to go," said Michael Fauscette, an analyst with IDC. But the stakes have rarely been higher for Google. Social networking failures like Wave and Buzz are "the glaring failure in their history -- the thing they had failed to do -- which was to bring people into their products," said Steven Levy, who followed the Google+ team, code named "Emerald Sea," as he reported his new book, "In the Plex." "In the heads of all the people at Google, right up to the very top, it became clear that this was something that was essential to Google's very survival." Gundotra, a former Microsoft executive who had already become one of the most public faces of Google for his fluid speaking style at Google product launches, was tabbed by co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and former CEO Eric Schmidt to take the reins of the next social effort. What struck Gundotra 13 months ago was the makeup of the Google team. "These were all the nutty people," Gundotra said. "Why in the world would you work on yet another social product at Google? You had to be pretty nutty. You had to be entrepreneurial. You had to be willing to take risks. There was very little reason to have faith that this effort would be more successful than the earlier ones." "This wasn't a project that was a surefire winner, or a nice place to coast," Horowitz agreed. "This was a project that required passion just to show up every day, and a willingness to sort of tilt at windmills -- a startup-level passion." The team included Andy Hertzfeld, a 57-year old engineer who was on the team that designed the MacIntosh computer at Apple (AAPL) in the early 1980s. Hertzfeld built some of the initial software for the Circles product, in which a little green bubble floats to the top of the page when a user drops a connection into one of their Circles. "Andy is a tremendous talent," Horowitz said. "I think his spirit, his whimsy, his approach shines through." While the Google team recently added another 1980s Apple veteran, Bill Atkinson, Hertzfeld has said stories that Google built the network by tapping Apple's design genius are off-target, and that the contributions of "awesome young" team members like Shaun Modi, Jonathan Terleski, and Joseph Smarr were huge. The team huddled together on a single floor of Building 2000, where they could have discussions and debates and trouble-shoot problems on the way to the restroom or to have lunch, without having to schedule a meeting. They created team traditions like "Formal Fridays," in which everyone had to dress with increasing formality each week until launch. "What started out as blazers turned into tuxedos for some people. It was fun to sort of create that cultural tradition," Horowitz said. "It was also uncomfortable in the sense that the last thing engineers want to do is dress up. So the longer we delayed launch, the worse it was going to get. So it created a good incentive." Gundotra and Horowitz said Google's many failures in social networking turned into an advantage. The team started by taking a step back, trying to figure out what they learned from the failures of Buzz, Orkut and Wave. Then, they listened to users talk about what they liked and didn't like about current social services. "It wasn't really rocket science," Gundotra said. Horowitz believes the dizzying array of social products from Facebook to Twitter to Flickr to LinkedIn have befuddled the average user. "What we found was that sharing was fundamentally broken on the Net. It's not that there weren't a million ways to share; it's that there were a million ways to share. They weren't coherent." Googe internal data shows that users are two to three times more likely to share content within one of their Circles than to make a general post. But Google+ is far from a finished product. Among the more glaring absences is the lack of ads. Nor does it have the massive list of games and other apps built by independent developers and outside companies like Zynga that run on the Facebook platform. There has been criticism that Google+ is too male-centric, although Gundotra and Horowitz dispute that, saying women in particular are doing more sharing in private circles rather than public posts. "If you're not careful, when you're just observing from outside, you mistakenly might be saying, 'Oh the women aren't commenting,' " Gundotra said. In fact, "most of the excitement on Google+ is dark matter; it's not visible" because it's privately shared with a Circle instead of a public post. Google won't disclose current numbers, athough estimates of 10 million users "sound very stale to me," said Horowitz. Google is struggling to accommodate businesses, as well as an influx of celebrites like Alyssa Milano, William Shatner and 50 Cent. The former Capt. James T. Kirk was mistakenly booted from the service in recent days before being reinstated. "We did not anticipate this much this soon, in terms of traffic and passion of users," Horowitz said. "We thought we had the due course of time to get it right before the world came to our doorstep. The world is at our door, and they want it, and they want it now." Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/swiftstories. To see more of the San Jose Mercury News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.mercurynews.com. Copyright (c) 2011, San Jose Mercury News, Calif. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For more information about the content services offered by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services (MCT), visit www.mctinfoservices.com. |