Introducing the Google+ project: Real-life sharing, rethought for the web
Among the most basic of human needs is the need to connect with others. With a smile, a laugh, a whisper or a cheer, we connect with others every single day. — Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has circled social for years without landing it: Shared Stuff in 2007 was a bookmark-and-share experiment that went nowhere, and by early 2008 commentators like Jeff Jarvis were arguing that the internet itself is the social network — a framing Google now seems to have taken literally by wiring sharing directly into its existing properties rather than shipping another standalone destination.
First-order effects
- Facebook faces its first direct competitor with Google's distribution behind it — TechCrunch readers were already noting within a day how familiar the interface looks, so differentiation rests on features like Hangouts group video, not layout.
- Skype's group video calling picks up a free rival overnight: GigaOM argued the day of launch that Google+ threatens Skype more than Facebook, because Hangouts attacks paid multi-party video rather than the status-update feed.
Second-order effects
- Facebook will be pushed to respond on privacy granularity and grouping — the 'circles' model makes coarse all-or-nothing friend lists look dated, forcing feature parity work regardless of whether users defect.
- Search and social begin converging inside one company: if sharing signals flow back into Google's ranking and ads, rivals without a search business have to decide whether to build their own identity layer or partner.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social stops being a walled destination and becomes an embedded layer across every major platform's existing products — with the open question, voiced skeptically by Dave Winer's 'Google Yawn', being whether a company this size can sustain consumer-social iteration over multiple years rather than treating each attempt as disposable.
The trend: Large internet platforms are absorbing social networking into their existing product ecosystems — search, video, communications — rather than competing on standalone social destinations alone.