Why Google Has No Game
A few weeks ago, I wrote Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications, a post that dissected why Google doesn't get social. Since then, Google appears to have stepped up its efforts to develop a coherent social strategy.
Context & Ripple Effects
This GigaOM column is a direct sequel to the author's own 'Pandas and Lobsters' thesis that Google cannot build social applications, and it lands two weeks after Technology Review posed the same open question about whether Google could get social networking right. What has changed since: Google has visibly moved, completing its acquisition of visual-shopping startup Like.com on August 20 and relaunching Realtime Search with new tools and a dedicated home, building on real-time features first introduced in December.
The piece also arrives amid friction over how Google treats other people's social data — Yelp's frustration at seeing its reviews surfaced in Google Places ended with checks showing Yelp content pulled entirely from Places. That episode frames the analyst's argument: Google acquires and aggregates social signals rather than cultivating community.
First-order effects
- Google's social push is running through acquisitions and feature retrofits — Like.com closed August 20, Realtime Search got new tooling — rather than a purpose-built social product, exactly the gap the column identifies.
- Content partners are reacting hard: Yelp's complaints led Google to strip Yelp reviews from Places entirely, cooling the data-sharing relationship at the moment Google most needs social graph inputs.
Second-order effects
- Other review and local-content providers face the same fork Yelp hit — feed Google's Places and risk commoditization, or withhold data and lose distribution — forcing explicit licensing stances across the local-content market.
- Facebook and Twitter gain negotiating leverage as Google's appetite for social data becomes visible; every aggregation move Google makes sharpens partners' awareness that their graphs are strategic assets.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Google's social strategy stays acquisition-led and engineering-centric, raising the structural question of whether a search-advertising company can organize product teams around social design at all.
- Repeated partner conflicts like the Yelp standoff point toward tighter contractual control of content licensing in local and social search, with regulators and publishers both taking a harder line on how aggregators reuse contributed data.
The trend: Google is trying to assemble a social strategy through acquisitions and search-feature retrofits while its core product instincts pull against community-building — a tension every subsequent social attempt would inherit.