Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz were the proud parents of Google+.
Gundotra, a former Microsoft exec who became one of the top five lieutenants to Google CEO Larry Page, was hand-picked to oversee the creation of Google+ -- a social network meant to challenge Facebook -- and ex-Yahoo bigwig Horowitz was his right-hand man. So it's no surprise that people are questioning the future of the service after Google announced that Gundotra is leaving the company and that Google+ will now be run not by Horowitz but by someone few outside the company have ever heard of.
The tech blog TechCrunch says Google+ is "the walking dead" after Gundotra's departure, claiming that the service will "no longer be considered a product, but a platform -- essentially ending its competition with other social networks like Facebook and Twitter." Translation: Google+ will be less of a place where you constantly go to read stuff and post stuff, and more like online plumbing, something that trades information with other Google services like Gmail and YouTube.
Those few words from TechCrunch have sparked some serious anger among the Silicon Valley cognoscenti. And the Google PR team vehemently denies the claims. The Gundotra announcement has "no impact on our Google+ strategy," the company says. But if the strategy isn't changing, it should. If you put aside all the sniping, a less monolithic Google+ is the natural path.
The fact of the matter is that -- separate from any internal politics at Google -- social networking is changing fast. Even Facebook, the dominating incumbent that gave Google+ a drubbing, will tell you this. As people move away from the web and onto smartphones and tablets, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and company are seriously changing the way their company operates, essentially splitting their massive social networks into a vast collection of individual mobile apps. Google+ needs to change as well.
Whatever else is going on inside Google, the new head of Google+ -- engineering director Dave Besbris -- is a nice metaphor for where the service should go. Besbris isn't Gundotra. He's not someone with a big public profile. But he serves a purpose. That's what Google+ should be.
In truth, relatively few people use Google+ for active Facebook-style "social networking." But it provides a way for Google to track your behavior and data across all its other services. That makes it useful to Google and useful to people who use Google. It will never be Facebook, but it doesn't need to be. In the future, even Facebook doesn't need to be Facebook.
As Facebook has discovered, a sprawling, strongly-branded social network isn't as relevant in the new world of mobile devices, where people want narrowly-targeted apps. But the underlying fabric of a social network can provide a common back-end for those apps, making them easier to configure and monetize. That's why Facebook has been ripping functionality out of its big broad main app and shifting it to its more specialized apps, all united by the company's social plumbing.
Over the past two and a half years, Google has been laying much the same kind of pipe, putting Google+ plumbing behind apps like Hangouts, YouTube, and Snapseed. This means that, in addition to serving as a forum for Facebook-style status messages, Google+ has always played a simultaneous role as a social layer that powers Google as a whole, letting the company centralize information about your likes, interests, and background that it can use to target premium advertisements. That is its main strength.
Google may or may not continue to push Google+ as its own "product," but whatever it does with the front-end of Google+ -- the website and app people actually interact with -- it won't be that important. For one thing, people already have Facebook, and the Google+ front-end doesn't give them much that's different. "G+ didn't work as an actively-used social network because it provided no new features users wanted," says Clay Shirky, an NYU professor who has long made a study of online groups. "The networks that have done well post-2010 are those that provide new kinds of messaging, not new kinds of linking: Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, WeChat."
Google+'s most distinctive feature was its "circles" system for segregating social connections into distinct groups. But it turned out people preferred to segregate social connections not with circles but by network -- Facebook for friends and family, LinkedIn for coworkers, Twitter for fans, and so on. "The concept of circles was always a little muddy -- it was meant to be amplifier and filter of messages at the same time, so it wasn't optimized for either," says Shirky.
The trend is why Facebook is acquiring apps like Instagram and WhatsApp -- and keeping them as standalone products. It may plug them into its larger social network, but they will retain their own identity. This only makes sense -- it's what the people want -- and it shows the way forward for any social network. Including Google+.
