Why Google's screwup on Google+ brand pages is a big deal
There's been a lot of sound and fury about the way Google has approached branded (i.e., non-personal) pages on its new Google+ social network. Much of it is a symptom of internecine warfare among the big tech blogs …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google+ is less than a week old — the service launched on July 20 with its Circles feature drawing signups — and the company has already stumbled on a governance question most launches defer: whether organizations can hold accounts at all. Brands wanting an official presence have been shut out of non-personal pages, and the resulting outcry landed just as reports surfaced that early Circles enthusiasm was curdling into 'Circles fatigue.'
The timing compounds an already rough stretch for Google's public judgment: the same week brought word of its PittPatt facial-recognition acquisition and of search-display changes removing outside customer reviews, made under a disclosed U.S. antitrust investigation. The article's own read is that part of the brand-pages fury is internecine warfare among big tech blogs rather than pure user revolt — but the underlying policy gap is real.
First-order effects
- Brands eager for a Google+ foothold at launch cannot create official pages, leaving them to choose between sitting out the opening window or improvising around the personal-account rules while Google absorbs the backlash days into the product's life.
Second-order effects
- Marketers with no Google+ page to build fall back on Facebook's established brand-page infrastructure during the gap, deepening the incumbent's hold on exactly the audience Google needs to convert; meanwhile tech-blog infighting amplifies the story, framing the young network as unready for professional use.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, account-identity governance — who may hold a profile, whether organizations and pseudonyms qualify — becomes a launch-critical product decision for social platforms rather than an afterthought, with missteps shaping adoption among brands before any feature set can compensate.
The trend: As social networks compete for both personal users and brand budgets, platform rules on account identity are emerging as a front-line competitive differentiator decided at launch, not refined later.