The Hawthorne Effect

For the record, I’m typically skeptical about new services or products that launch on the internet to a flurry of hoopla and buzz. Too often the hype never lives up to the reality, and the products end up being one trick ponies or can’t scale in a way that generates revenue. 9 times out of 10 they end up dead shortly after arrival.

Enter Google+.

No sooner than it launched, the ‘in crowd’ of the internet wasted no time in calling it a Facebook killer, a blog killer, and a Twitter killer among other things. It was a game changer, a reinvention of Google, and the cure for cancer all rolled into one. The hyperbole machine was definitely in full effect.

I would consider myself a power social media user. On any given day I use Facebook, Twitter, LInkedIn, and Wordpress for various work and personal communication tasks. Given my job, I thought it prudent to get my mitts on an invite to G+ and create an account to see what all the fuss was about. I can’t say I was particularly jazzed to do so, but logged in more from a sense of occupational duty than for the promise of yet-another-social-channel-to-manage.  For G+ to be added into my daily life, it would have to offer me something seriously unique or valuable.

News flash: It does not. At all.

G+ feels like the classic engineering solution to trying to build a better Facebook. G+ focuses on creating a better Facebook-like experience rather than building upon a unique customer insight to fill a need or solve a problem. The minute you log in, you can see the resemblance to the Goliath it’s trying to slay. Some of the features are a bit more polished than their FB counterparts, but the features and tools are almost identical. G+ isn’t so much a new social network as it’s Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character in Single White Female. It shows up at Facebook’s apartment, wears Facebook’s clothes and hopes to steal its boyfriend and assume its identity.

The magic to Facebook’s growth over the past few years has come from women, baby boomers and global expansion. If you’re a forty two year old mother of three from Oregon, are you really going to change communities without a vastly better experience or value proposition?

The answer is no.

The only people Google+ seems to be helping are the people at Google, who see a huge need to keep behavioral data flowing in so that they can continue to have relevant user information to sell to advertisers. Make no mistake, Google is an ad network disguised as a search engine, and the product they sell is you.

Given that G+ is an invite only beta at the moment, I’m sure we will see a slew of new features to go along with a deluge of press releases telling us why Facebook is dead. Don’t believe it. For a company that has launched so many new tools that were supposed game changers and failed miserably (See Google’s Wave, Buzz, Latitude, Knol, Health,  Lively, Search Wiki, Audio Ads, Video, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Notebook, Catalogs, Print Ads, Answers, Sidewiki, Friend Connect, Page Creator, and Web Accelerator), I’m surprised the company gets as much benefit of the doubt as it does. My guess is that G+ will be joining that illustrious list sooner rather than later.

I believe I called this: http://laptoplogic.com/resources/how-facebook-is-becoming-the-next-myspace