Steve Yegge, a high-profile Google engineer, wrote a private rant about Amazon and Google and then accidentally (or not) made it public. For most of the rant he talks about how he hated working for Amazon, but a very interesting part of it is about Google and the company’s inability to understand platforms.
Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there’s something there for everyone.
The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought.
Now even though lots of “technologists” are saying Google+ is more successful than Facebook and Twitter were in their early days, I think they’re forgetting one huge thing. The large number of users Google+ has is due to the fact that Google already had a huge user base. They just managed to make a small percentage of those users sign up for their new product. That’s not an indicator of success.
And this may be just me, but I have absolutely nothing to do on Google+ right now, so Steve is spot on in calling the service a “knee-jerk reaction” to Facebook’s success. There’s a million things to do on Facebook and nearly nothing to do on Google+.
