Google+ Isn't Dead, It's Just Overexposed

What's This?

Vic Gundotra, Google Senior Vice President of Engineering, in happier times for Google Plus at Google I/O in 2012.

Image: Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

By Chris Taylor2014-04-25 00:33:15 UTC

Sometimes — less frequently these days, thankfully — Google+ still gets compared to a ghost town. It's a metaphor from the early days of the social service, and if it was ever accurate, it has not been appropriate for years. We don't know just how inaccurate, because Google won't reveal helpful user numbers, but we'll get to that.

The ghost town jokes came round again Thursday, when Vic Gundotra, the executive responsible for Google+, announced on the service that he was leaving Google. At this stage in the game, the punchlines are irresistible. Here's one of the best:

Another made fun of the fact that Gundotra rumors appeared days earlier on Secret:

Meanwhile, TechCrunch claimed that Google+ was "walking dead" — because, according to anonymous sources, some of its engineers are getting reshuffled to the Android division. Which had nothing to do with Gundotra's departure, the report admitted. Nor has a minor inside-baseball shift from calling Google+ a "product" to calling it a "platform." A Google spokesperson declared that "today’s news has no impact on our Google+ strategy" to "build great user experiences."

Ghosts, zombies, products, platforms and user experiences, oh my. Clearly, one of the biggest ongoing challenges with Google+ is in explaining to the average Internet user exactly what this thing is. Perhaps there's no easy way to do that, but let's at least try to think up some new and more appropriate metaphors. There are plenty of photographers on the service, so perhaps we could see it as a colorful photograph that got overexposed by careless developers — and now they're trying to redevelop it in a darker room.

Personally, I like to think of Google+ as a beehive — from which the beekeeper has been trying to extract way too much honey way too fast. Back in January I wrote an op-ed that, unintentionally, poked that hive. It took Google to task for, among other things, allowing anyone on Google+ to contact anyone on Gmail. I gave Google+ power users their props, but compared the way Google was pushing the service to (yet another metaphor alert!) a party host trying too hard to make a raging party happen.

See also: Sorry, Google+, We Still Won't Come to Your Party

Right after that published, I discovered to my surprise and creeping horror that my inactive Google+ account was seeing some activity — and had attracted more than 13,000 followers. Or in other words, what seemed like 13,000 airborne carriers of stings, all circling around, angry that I'd appeared to attack their queen. (I hadn't, of course, I'd attacked the way Google had chosen to market its social network, but that was a fine distinction few got.)

The buzz about Circles

Undaunted, I decided to poke the beehive a second time. I told my newfound followers exactly why I, as a would-be user, had not explored the service further. I said I was mystified by its appeal but open-minded, and I asked them to give me one reason why I should take the plunge.

There were a number of helpful, thoughtful and lengthy replies to that post. But what I got for the most part was an angry buzz. (Not to be confused with Google Buzz.) Why should we care if you don't get it? it said. We like it. I got a picture of hives within hives, a thousand busy niches all making their own kinds of honey. Google+ seems a great way to network if you have a few particular niches that interest you. Here's a sampling of the responses:

"I treat it like a personally customizable forum, where I'm constantly getting conversations with people I respect and about topics that interest me."

"I joined G+ not long after it opened and in short order found an amazing community of writers, photographers, musicians, painters, and other creatives that I network with on a daily basis. Oh, and was able to find a kick ass developmental editor and started working with a small publisher that puts together themed anthologies, all on G+. I also started a nice little practice of art swaps with folks here."

"Every time I add someone on Facebook, it asks me if I know this person offline, which seems to defeat the purpose of a social media network ... My friends weren't here. But they are now. I use G+ to meet new people, to make new connections. It seems to me that's what this technology is all about."

"The news feed is very dull until you have a few hundred in your circles. Circle people. Interact ... I still prefer the circle system to Facebook's method of grouping people."

And my personal favorite: "Let the popular kids stay on Faceplant. Keep G+ weird."

Weirdness rules

There you have the problem in a nutshell. Google+ has grown into a thriving community, or rather a complex and interlocking set of introverted communities that really don't want to be hassled by insiders. Google, however, is a company obsessed by the competition from the cooler, younger Valley kid down the road, Facebook.

So Google keeps reporting the number of people who've been forced into using Google+ to login for something, via YouTube or Hangouts or Gmail, as if that were some sort of meaningful estimate of the size of this beehive. It isn't, and we all know it; the beehive knows it better than most.

Whatever Google does with the Google+ "platform" in the wake of Gundotra's departure, it needs to achieve a number of things. Firstly, it needs to create a more rigid and precise definition of the service, ideally one that doesn't include Hangouts, which really are their own thing at this stage. Secondly, it needs to be honest about the number of people using Circles in the way those 13,000 hardcore users appear to be.

There's no shame in the number being small compared to Facebook, because let's be honest here: no one is going to catch Facebook's 1.3 billion monthly active user number at this point. That ship, to switch metaphors yet again, has sailed. But if Google were proud of precisely what it had built, of this wonderfully weird town of many metaphors, a lot of us might understand it better — and be more willing to explore it.

Continue to let most Google users experience it as a place they fall into when they click the wrong button in Google's UI, however, and Google will never outrun the ghost town jokes.

Instead, Google should the advice of its power users — and keep Google+ weird.

Topics: Social Media