Inside Google Plus
For all of Google's successes, the company has an underwhelming track record when it comes to social networks. Time after time, its attempts have been met with shrugs or downright hostility. An early offering called Orkut languished in obscurity (unless you live in Brazil).
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's social ambitions have a long tail: back in 2007, bloggers were already diagnosing how to fix Google's then-flagship social network, and Orkut's fate — thriving in Brazil, ignored nearly everywhere else — became shorthand for the company's inability to convert search-scale reach into social gravity. When Google+ launched in mid-2011, the New York Times framed it as the first attempt that actually improves on Facebook rather than merely imitating it.
Wired's feature lands at the moment that claim gets tested: the service is out of invite-only beta, and observers are already mining its source code for what ships next — unconfirmed traces of a 'Google Experts' feature, a Facebook wall-style feed, and circle sharing. The story matters because it asks whether Google's repeated social failures are a design problem or something structural.
First-order effects
- Google+ product lead Bradley Horowitz's team faces immediate pressure to convert launch buzz into daily habit, with every unannounced feature surfacing in the source code — including rumored circle sharing — effectively pre-leaked before release.
- Facebook, named throughout the coverage as the benchmark Google+ is measured against, now has a well-resourced challenger openly targeting its core feed-and-friends mechanics.
Second-order effects
- If Google+ sustains traction, competitors and partners must decide whether to build for both graphs or treat Google's identity layer (tied to its other services) as a second login standard, splitting developer attention.
- The pattern of features leaking through source-code inspection pushes Google toward tighter control of pre-release builds, changing how it communicates roadmaps to the developer community.
Third-order effects
- If the Orkut-to-Google+ pattern holds — strong engineering, weak network effects — it points toward a structural conclusion that social success depends on incumbent user lock-in more than product quality, shaping how any large platform company approaches social going forward.
- Repeated high-profile social attempts by a company of Google's scale invite scrutiny of whether regulators and advertisers should treat the social-graph market as winner-take-all, a question the AT&T-T-Mobile antitrust fight already has Google arguing in court on adjacent grounds.
The trend: Large platform companies keep discovering that search-scale distribution does not transfer to social networks, where incumbent network effects — not feature quality — decide winners.