Farewell to over Five-Thousand Friends and Followers: Let’s meet at LinkedIn, Goodreads, Twitter, and on this blog. See the links at the end of this article.
How Google+ Started
2011 was a year of upheaval and uncertainty in Silicon Valley. Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs died this year. Facebook was preparing to go public. And Eric Schmidt, who served as Google CEO for a decade, was replaced by co-founder Larry Page.
Google+ opened up for invitation-only access in June 2011. In its early days, it attracted an optimistic collection of disaffected Facebook users, miscellaneous Twitter refugees, photographers, and Google super fans. Above all, it proved alluring to aspiring influencers.
Better Than Facebook in Every Way
The site was better than Facebook in almost every way. Google+ posts let you type up to 100,000 characters. You could write a novel in a post. Google+ photos looked like the originals. Photographers flocked to Google+. At the time, Facebook allowed you only to “friend” people, which meant you couldn’t follow them unless they followed you back. Google+ let you “follow” people, like Twitter.
Leading the Google+ project was former Microsoft executive Vic Gundotra. Together, Page and Gundotra essentially forced many other Google teams–and many Google users–kicking and screaming into Google+ integrations of every description. In Page’s first week as CEO, he issued an edict commanding that 25% of every Google employee’s bonus would be directly tied to the company’s success in social. Page’s idea was with such an incentive, employees would not only want to create innovative social features, but they’d also convince their family and friends to try new Google social services, including and especially the forthcoming Google+ social network.
During the last eight years, I wrote at least a dozen articles, how to best use Google+ and pointed out the many benefits for writers, artists, and everyone else. I taught it in workshops and over the internet. I showed how easy it was to connect the site with Twitter, to advertise any events, from book signings to book fairs, and used Google+ myself practically every day since 2011.
The first version of Google+ allowed your stream to refresh automatically. Many users kept it open on their desktops to watch the posts go by as they worked all day. The integrations were amazing. You could receive posts or comments in Gmail, and post from Gmail to Google+. And people could email you from within Google+ without ever knowing your email address.
Hangouts and Hangouts on Air played live in posts, and people could comment on Hangouts in progress. The recordings of these Hangouts continued to live on as video posts. Hangouts were a signature Google+ feature, later spun out. You could recommend a restaurant on Google+, and have that recommendation show up in Google Maps. Because of the integrations—and because of that high-quality Google search—GooglePlus became the best tool available.
The most innovative feature was “Circles”. Before Facebook enabled groupings of people into “family,” “friends” and so on, Google+ let you create “Circles” of people and then share those circles. You could also recommend groups of people, and others could follow your whole Circle.
Over its 20-year history, Google has succeeded wildly with products in a great many businesses: Search, Gmail, YouTube, Android, and others. But it tends to fail with products that involve public social interaction.
The Nail in the Coffin
Data Breach – 2018 Incident – Reported to Users in March 2019. Google opted not to disclose to users its discovery of a bug that gave outside developers access to private data. Since May 2018, the new EU General Data Protection Regulation (DSGVO) has been applied. Articles 33 and 34 of the Code provide Internet companies such as Google with precise transparency requirements on how to communicate such security issues. Earlier this month I finally received an email with an apology from Google+
Deliberately Concealed
The Hamburg Data Protection Commissioner Johannes Caspar: “Apparently, Google deliberately concealed the incident, so grass on the matter grows, the central question will be when the gap was closed by Google” he told the news agency DPA. It is therefore strictly required in certain cases to inform affected users and the relevant supervisory authorities. Those who violate the GDPR face penalties of up to four percent of the annual turnover.
Google+ Could Have Worked
Without question, Google has the technical capabilities to deliver breathtaking, meaningful, new features. But they didn’t listen to their customers. Google+ could have connected to young influencers and created a uniquely awesome space for them, as Snapchat did. They just though their elegant engineering would deliver an audience. They thought they mattered just because they were smart – because they were Google.
Google Did a Terrible Job Marketing G+
Their worldview was completely arrogant. Instead of creating a cool new place for the “in” crowd, they delivered something nice. clean-cut. safe. But if you’re going to take on Facebook, you’re going to have to forge a relevant and bold new identity.
Arrogance killed Google+
Arrogance may be the fatal flaw that ultimately kills the whole company, in fact, Google+ had no customer-centered marketing strategy. They kept adding bland features, reorganizing, and changing leaders at the top when they should have put an emphasis on developing a meaningful brand that developed an emotional bond with its users. A lesson for all new businesses: Why do you matter to your customers?
In recent years, Google senior executives even stopped using Google+. CEO Sundar Pichai’s last post on Google+ was in March of 2016. When Pichai wants to post something, he turns to Twitter. So why wait this long to kill what is clearly a burden and embarrassment to Google? The answer is that Google+ still had some very devoted fans. But why? The company gave multiple reasons for its decision: It found a security flaw in Google+, consumer engagement is low, and running a social site is hard. So it’s closing Google+ for consumers on April 2, 2019.
Google Plus could really have become something big if it had set a sign and explained clearly: “Your content as user belongs to you and not to us”. Having said all this, I will miss Google+ dearly. It was my favored social media site.
Let’s meet here:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/doris-maria-heilmann-65345595
http://on.fb.me/TvqDaK
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6551256.Doris_Maria_Heilmann
https://www.books2read.com/ap/n4EYY8/Doris-Maria-Heilmann
http://about.me/ebookPR
https://www.savvybookwriters.com/
http://www.twitter.com/111publishing
http://www.twitter.com/ebooksIntl
http://www.twitter.com/ebookPR
Resources:
https://businessesgrow.com/2018/10/09/google-failure/
https://writershemisphere.wordpress.com/2018/10/11/googles-itsy-bitsy-problem/
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