e-commerce & social media

I joined Google the day after my Stanford graduation in June of 2011, and two days later got to take a peek at the product I would be working on for the next three months...

The news yesterday that Vic Gundotra, Google’s Senior Vice President of Social, is leaving comes as little surprise. I read about it on Facebook first, then on Twitter, then on Secret, and then on Google+, which perhaps says everything about the success of Google’s most recent foray into social. Google+’s momentmay have passed, but the lessons to be learned will last a lifetime for me, and for the hundreds of others who played a role in building it.

The Coming Death of GoogleToday, it can be hard to imagine that Google faced a deep existential threat to its business three years ago. The company’s financials were as strong as always, but there was a growing cacophony among bloggers and the wider media over the future of the company in the throes of an industry rapidly changing due to social, local and mobile. Google was still primarily a web-based company, the bulk of its revenues derived from advertising that had failed to deeply penetrate any of these three nascent verticals....

Via Jeff Domansky