Your new post is loading...
Today, Google’s Vic Gundotra announced that he would be leaving the company after eight years. The first obvious question is where this leaves Google+,..
Basic/ Digest...
What we’re hearing from multiple sources is that Google+ will no longer be considered a product, but a platform — essentially ending its competition with other social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
As part of these staff changes, the Google Hangouts team will be moving to the Android team, and it’s likely that the photos team will follow, these people said. Basically, talent will be shifting away from the Google+ kingdom and towards Android as a platform, we’re hearing.
This would telegraph a major acceleration of mobile efforts in general, rather than G+. The teams will apparently be building “widgets,” which take advantage of Google+ as a platform, rather than a focus on G+ as its own integral product.
Before we had Google+, we had Google Accounts. But we also had a mess, where even though you had a Google Account, you might have a different profile used for Google Maps versus Google Knol (remember!) versus YouTube versus Orkut…..
So if Google+ goes away, I’d imagine you’d still have a Google Account, perhaps with a profile page, perhaps offering all the integration with Google services as there is now. It just wouldn’t be called Google+.
Google has also had terrible luck with other “social” type products, such as Buzz (which is now dead), and Orkut, which only took off in a few parts of the world, the U.S. not being one of them. So abandoning the idea of a standalone social network in favor of using it as a way to weave together Google’s other more popular and significant products makes a lot of sense.
So where does all this leave what is, on the surface, a rudderless social network like Google+? Unlike Google Reader (which had a small but passionate audience) or Google Wave (which almost no one used), the Plus profile is now baked into Google on an infrastructure level. You need the Plus login for everything from Google's apps on Apple's iPhone to next-gen technology like Google Glass. Google's footprint isn't just across the web anymore. It's everywhere.
Whereas Facebook is going the Google route by unbundling and breaking up its services (Paper, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram) into multiple pieces, Google's problem was always the inverse: It was never able to tie everything all together. That's the core value of Plus, which is why, for the foreseeable future, Google+ will likely continue to exist as it exists now. (Which is to say: quietly.)
____________________________________________________
► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html (your privacy is protected).
Via Marteq
FC has this right: Google+ will continue to exist as is for a while. And the argument that it will transition to a platform for a variety of apps makes sense. But this shouldn't impact Google Authorship, which you need to continue to exploit. And you should continue to use Google+ as a means of content distribution, given its current value to the B2B marketer.