Give up Google!

Made Essential Reading on 09 August 2010 Felix Hemsley

First, we had Google Search, then we were given Google Maps & Google Earth, then it all seemed to go a bit wrong…

It’s rather odd that such a large organisation with a wealth of knowledge within it can so regularly fail in the realm of social media. The concept of collaborative document editing was handed to us in the wrapper of Google Wave, an application which was set to revolutionise how we all worked together online. Now it’s probably true that many people never even thought it came out of Beta or that invites were still being sent around the web…well to be honest they wouldn’t be far wrong.

All in all Google Wave was something of a failure which came to a head just a few days ago with the announcement that it would no longer be supported nor further developed.

Add to this, the restricted number of users who have adopted Google Buzz, and there’s a rather strong picture that maybe people don’t want Google being at the core of their social interactions? Maybe there’s a fear that the data hungry monster would be too invasive into our “personal” interactions?

The two most successful social platforms which Google has are surely; Blogger & YouTube, both of which were developed and made popular externally and were then subsequently bought by Google. What a coincidence! Or maybe not…

Maybe what we’re seeing is a company which has previously positioned itself in the users mind as a provider of search functionalities. We’ve even taken to verbalising the brand, “To Google”. We’ve all said “Google it” more than once or twice, and this goes to show that we associate Google with search and because of that, we’re almost blinkered from other ventures to a great extent.

There’s no denying that Google has nailed the search game, so shouldn’t they just focus on that, and maintaining their other platforms such as Blogger and YouTube?

I feel that we have all the social networks and sharing facilities we can deal with at the moment, we’ve barely touched the surface of what is possible with the tools we have so far without the need for more!

Maybe Google should look to integrate existing platforms better into their products and enhance their offering? Such as integrating associated tweets for videos feeding into YouTube pages etc building on what they already have in place…

I’d be interested to hear what you think about Google’s approach to the social space, and what approach you feel may work for Google. Feel free to leave a comment below…