Literally thousands of commentators have posted their take on Google+ this week.
But I don’t want to join the peanut gallery passing detailed judgement on Google+ this early in the game. Clearly Google is committed to the endeavor and this is just Day One. As with any new initiative, I think it’s most important to define “success” and “tolerable failure” up-front.
Success case: feasible, yet unlikely to be achieved
It seems to me that a reasonable success case would see Google+ achieving results similar to what Microsoft has achieved thus far with Bing search. Through partnerships, Google+ can seek to raise their share of social network “engagement” to about 30% after investing a few billion dollars in the project.
To achieve this 30% market share, they’ll likely need to get about 60% of Facebook’s 500 million active users to also become active on Google+ on the assumption that users will initially devote less of their time to Google+ than Facebook. That’s a considerable uphill climb, although Google already knows a little bit about the “social graph” of each user via e-mail and other services.
Tolerable failure case: social products, without an engaging network
I think the most interesting aspect of Google+ is what the failure case looks like. Previous efforts like Buzz and Wave just dissapeared, or ended up in lawsuits. But I think the downside for Google+, given its deep integration with Google search, is that it just ends up becoming a wrapper for various Google’s non-core search engine services.
Already, we see signs of that with Google’s decision to retire Picasa and Blogger coinciding with the Google+ launch. In the future, I think it’s plausible that Google+ will be a UI from which to access Reader, Video Chat, Android and Shopping “apps.”
While, in this failure case, Google+ will fail to make any meaningful impact on Google’s share of social media attention, it will at least provide Google with enough social graph data to make its advertising targeting competitive with Facebook and provide an attractive API for developers to build upon.
The trillion-dollar question which I’d be trying to find the KPIs to track is: can a social product thrive independent of an engaging social network?
