How Google Can Beat Facebook Without Google Plus
Look, Google, we've got a plan to help you win on social. There's only one catch: you have to give up the notion that animates Google Plus. — Out in the Mojave Desert, there's a place called California City that's fascinated …
Context & Ripple Effects
This argument arrives after two years of evidence that Google's social push has struggled to hold an audience: an early feature-by-feature comparison against Facebook in mid-2011 gave way to reports of fading user interest by that November, and by February 2012 the Wall Street Journal was cataloging the mounting minuses at Google+. It extends a critique GigaOM had already framed in 2010 with 'Why Google Has No Game' — the company's social deficit predates Plus itself.
What sharpens the timing is Google's own behavior just before publication: on May 24, 2012 it removed the 'People and Pages On Google+' content box from its search results, replacing it with varied Knowledge Graph content. The piece's core prescription — drop the notion animating Plus — lands days after Google quietly dialed back one of Plus's most visible search integrations.
First-order effects
- Google faces an immediate strategic fork between the article's advice and its own trajectory: unconfirmed reports of new 'Events' and 'Local' features for Google+ point to doubling down inside Plus rather than abandoning its premise.
- Facebook's position is unaffected in the short term — the challenge here is internal to Google, whose search-results changes show it already hedging on how prominently Plus appears.
Second-order effects
- If Google stopped treating Plus as a Facebook rival, competition would shift to terrain where Android gives it leverage — IDC put Android plus iOS above 80% of smartphones shipped in Q1 2012 — pressuring Facebook to defend mobile distribution rather than the social graph alone.
- Rival social products would gain room if Google's identity layer loosened; conversely, a retrenched Google could redirect social investment into search-adjacent surfaces like Knowledge Graph content.
Third-order effects
- The deeper pattern is the synthetic supply paradox: building a social network to serve corporate strategy rather than organic user demand tends to produce audiences that must be manufactured through integration — and integration fatigue, as the search-box removal suggests.
- If Google heeds the piece, the structural lesson for the industry would be that platform incumbents compete in social through distribution and utility, not by cloning the leader's product shape.
The trend: Google's social strategy is drifting from head-on competition with Facebook toward embedding social signals across search, Android, and services — a contest of distribution rather than networks.