‘Sign in with Google’ button could send Google+ to oblivion
The abrupt departure of Google+ creator Vic Gundotra from the beleaguered social network led to immediate speculation that its days as a competitor to Facebook and Twitter are numbered. Indeed, media reports have asserted …
Context & Ripple Effects
The story lands four days after Vic Gundotra, who built and ran Google+, left the company after eight years, with VP of engineering David Besbris taking over. Reporting since then has pointed one direction: Google is said to be recasting Google+ as more a platform than a product, with key staff moving to the Android team and fewer forced integrations, while even Googlers tell reporters they are unsure how far the scale-back will go.
The retreat has long been visible in the numbers: L.A. Times data flagged fading user interest as far back as November 2011, so Gundotra's exit reads less as a shock than as confirmation. The Verge's read — that the 'Sign in with Google' button matters more than the social feed — remains unconfirmed speculation, but eight outlets from Business Insider to Network World picked up the same framing within days, which itself shows how settled the assumption of retreat had become.
First-order effects
- David Besbris inherits a network whose mandate appears to be shrinking from Facebook-and-Twitter competitor to identity layer, with reported staff transfers to Android signaling where Google wants its people focused.
Second-order effects
- Facebook and Twitter lose their only big-budget challenger for mainstream social sharing; Twitter, fresh off a Q1 of $250 million revenue and 14 million new monthly active users, faces competition mainly on execution rather than against a subsidized copycat.
Third-order effects
- If Google folds social features into sign-in and Android rather than maintaining a destination site, social networking splits into two models — standalone feeds like Facebook and Twitter versus embedded identity layers — and future challengers will be judged by which model they pick.
The trend: Google's pullback marks social networking's consolidation phase, where even the largest companies stop funding head-on Facebook rivals in favor of embedding identity into platforms they already control.