If at First You Don't Succeed... Google Introducing Another Social Network

If at first you don’t succeed, try again? At least that’s what Google believes. “Google making another attempt at social networking” by Jessica Guynn of LAtimes.com reports Google is going to introduce Google+, a social networking platform. This will be another Google venture in social media; their previous venture, Buzz, was gravely doomed as it automatically added Gmail contacts as friends and had privacy issues.  While previous CEO Eric Schmidt admits failure and disappointment trying to break into social networking, current CEO Larry Page is making it a priority.

Google is still one of the most significant successful parts of the Internet but their biggest threat is Facebook’s popularity. According to the article, “people are spending more time on Facebook, according to research firm ComScore. The average U.S. visitor spent 375 minutes on Facebook in May compared with 231 minutes for Google”.  Google+ is not only a way to compete with Facebook (although Google would not admit in the article they are trying to compete) but to maintain their place as the most popular spot online.

Google has learned from their Buzz experience and from public Facebook privacy issues that online privacy is a valuable commodity. As Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior VP of social put it, “Sometimes you just want to talk to a circle of friends, not the entire world or huge groups of people who are your ‘friends’. We think there is room for innovation there”. Thus, Google is going to differentiate Google+ from Facebook by focusing on privacy. The article paints Google+ as doing the same thing as Facebook but will allow people to manage friends, feeds, and privacy settings better.

Google+ is not going to be a “Facebook killer” but Google does have a point about the value of privacy. The problems are it is kind of late in the game; although Buzz is the past, it is a somewhat reflection of Google’s ability to handle social networking; and even if Google is claiming not to compete with Facebook, any social networking platform similar to it is considered to be competition and Facebook is a tough successful competitor. Hopefully, Larry Page has put a lot of thought into Google+ because another failure and Google will be out of the social networking game.