Lou Franco's Software Business Blog : google

Google’s Social Circles give it Acquisition Options

loufranco — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:58:31 GMT

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the social circles concept that a UX Researcher at Google is evangelizing. Here is the social circles presentation. The important part starts on Slide 47:

People don’t have one group of friends.

Making people create one big friends group has many of the same problems as planning seating arrangements at your wedding. […] Anyone who is married and went through this will remember how stressful it is.

Yet that’s what is happening online! Everyone being shoved into this big bucket. People don’t have one group of friends. Offline, people have multiple groups of friends that form around life stages and shared experiences.

This is sort of a problem with Facebook for me. Right now, it’s mostly managed by maintaining a separate profile on LinkedIn for my professional network, which brings up another advantage Circles would give Google – the ability to acquire LinkedIn.

Right now, if Facebook announced that it acquired LinkedIn, I’d probably delete one of my profiles. There’s just no way I could imagine them doing it the way I’d want it done (total separation). On the other hand, not withstanding Google’s Buzz debacle, if they do a good job with Circles, then I could see them incorporating LinkedIn or other networks.

The other obvious option is Ning. In Ning, circles are the default, as it’s a way of creating niche social networks. If I belong to different networks on Ning, my friends in one don’t even know I’m in another, let alone what’s going on in the network. Each Ning network is a natural fit for Circles.

This gives Google some options for growing their networks fast, and in a way that doesn’t break privacy. Even better, it’s a strategy that Facebook won’t want to copy as a single network seems to be part of their DNA, so it gives Google a vector of innovation to differentiate itself from Facebook.

Technical CEO’s must be CEO’s in addition to being Technical

loufranco — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:02:38 GMT

Paul Adams, a Google UX Researcher, is writing a book called Social Circles, which you can get a good preview of in this presentation.

Don’t be put off by the 216 slides – it’s a quick read. The key insight is that the Facebook model of a single group of friends doesn’t match real-life social circles that have mutually exclusive friends and that you might want to communicate to each differently.

The document itself is a call to action to Google to recognize that the web is undergoing fundamental change, and in some ways is reminiscent of Bill Gates’s memo about the Internet in 1995.

Paul Adams:

The social web is not a fad, and it’s not going away. It’s not an add-on to the web as we know it today. It’s a fundamental change, a re-architecture, and in hindsight its evolution is obvious.

[…] Make no mistake about this. Everyone in this room will need to learn how to design social features on websites.

[…] When we use search engines today, it’s a pretty solitary experience. We get millions of web pages in our results, yet we don’t see any other people.

Bill Gates:

Browsing the Web, you find almost no Microsoft file formats. After 10 hours of browsing, I had not seen a single Word .DOC, AVI file, Windows .EXE (other than content viewers), or other Microsoft file format.

[…] One scary possibility being discussed by Internet fans is whether they should get together and create something far less expensive than a PC which is powerful enough for Web browsing.

[…] The Internet is a tidal wave. It changes the rules. It is an incredible opportunity as well as incredible challenge.

The Gates memo is reminder of how a technical CEO is critical in leading a software company. It’s full of detailed instructions that only a former programmer would be able to understand.

Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are all very technical themselves, and yet this call to arms comes from someone else in the organization. I’m sure Paul Adams is very skilled, but not knowing the internal politics of Google, it’s not clear if his call to action will cause change. It’s not enough to be technical, you also must lead. In the “Next Steps” section of the Gates memo, he says:

I want every product plan to try and go overboard on Internet features. One element that will be crucial is coordinating our various activities. The challenge/opportunity of the Internet is a key reason behind the recent organization.

Google needs a similar message about social features coming from Schmidt.

Google’s Apps at Work

loufranco — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 18:57:34 GMT

Over at Jeff Shuey’s blog, I read about the announcement of Google’s Apps at Work. Jeff’s an absolute expert on what it means to be a Microsoft partner – he was a Partner Manager at Microsoft and in the ECM space, he’s been a Parter/Alliance manager for Kofax and Captaris. His take:

The challenge for Google will be to empower a vibrant group of partners that are willing to adopt, adapt, and accelerate.

I completely agree with him that partners are key to Microsoft’s product strategy (in any market), and that Google has yet to show that can replicate it.

Right now, without partners, they can only replace the parts of enterprise infrastructure that aren’t customized. The obvious one is e-mail, and that’s the main message on the AppsAtWork site: “switch from Microsoft Exchange”, not from SharePoint. They are definitely pushing the envelope of communication generally, but that won’t matter if I can’t tailor it to my specific (custom) needs.

Ironically, part of the problem Google is going to have is that you don’t need help installing their system. It’s already installed in their cloud – you just need to sign up and pay. The first company people turn to will be Google itself, not a partner. In the SharePoint world, you usually need help to get started and then partners can provide value-added services on top of that.

For role-models, Google needs to look at SalesForce and Apex. Not just working together, but copying Apex for Google Apps.