On Sunday, I finally chose a tablet. I had been circling what marketers would refer to as the ‘purchase funnel’ for a while, waiting for the Android market to mature (and not screw things up). After playing around with one of Samsung’s new Galaxy Tab 10.1 models for the best part of an hour – I’m thorough – I decided that this was probably the one for me. And I guess that Apple thought enough other people might reach that conclusion too, because they slapped Samsung with an injunction so hard that it put a freeze on sales across Europe. So, despite on-foot reconnaissance of the local stores, I came back empty-handed.
First world problems aside – thanks a bundle, Apple! Especially as it has transpired that their claims seem to be dubious at best. The trouble is, though, that this is just the most public execution in a series of behind-the-scenes assassinations in the tech world. It’s to do with patents, and the trolls that use them.
At about 10:15am Tuesday morning, I swear I noticed a mysterious black bar spanning the top of my Google search results. It vanished on my next, half-automatic click, and was lost and gone. Now, we know what that was. Google is on the social warpath again.
It’s called Google+, and I don’t want to dedicate excessive words to how it works: there are lots of goodsources for that. I want to look at the stuff going on behind the scenes.
Google+ is made up of Circles, Huddle, Sparks, Hangouts, Upload and Mobile. To describe things loosely:
Circles is probably the most immediately interesting part of G+. It’s a drag-and-drop group creation tool that ultimately forms, let’s be candid, a potential Facebook competitor (video). It’s obviously a way more streamlined – the Chrome to Facebook’s Firefox, if you like. It also addresses one of the key problems Facebook has, which is content overdose.
Once you start going over a certain number of friends, checking your status feed can be kind of a chore. To its credit, Facebook has tried to counter this by adding both manual and automatic filters. Trouble is, manual ones are unbelievably arduous to set, even to someone like me who doesn’t recoil at submenus. As for the automatic ones, well, they’re under fire for that as well.
Circles appears to make this a pretty painless experience at both ends.The other nice thing about Circles is that, because of its ability to tightly curate your own audiences, it has more flexibility than Facebook’s occasionally all-or-nothing approach (or manually adjusting settings for each new friend) – meaning that people might be a little more open. If I can easily assign someone to content-limited feeds – a new colleague, or promising date (or both, amirite) – without yet exposing my obsessive love of [whatever], then I may be more inclined to do that.
Huddle is basically focused, ad-hoc group chat (video). It’s not a new idea, but fulfils an essential role within social communications. You only need to look at the success of BlackBerry’s BBM service, which is a chief driver of adoption, to know that this functionality is in high demand. In fact, RIM are probably going to be pretty pissed off, as their struggle to survive will not be helped by cheap Android phones taking away one of its key USPs. More on Android in a bit…
Sparks is a content discovery engine. Essentially, it learns what you like and delivers it to you (video). The main purpose of this for Google is to get people using the service – something they have previously struggled with a lot in social. It’s telling that they have a second video to demonstrate how.
Hangouts (video!) is a multi-user chat room. It’s basically Huddle with webcams. The important difference with Hangouts is that people can flag themselves as passively, uh, hanging out, and ready to chat at any point. Like being logged in to a messaging service.
Upload and mobile I want to deal with together (video and video). In a nutshell, Google is providing a full, cloud-based communications suite straight out of the box. Use Huddle to get group together, take pictures, upload them to cloud, and have them distributed on Circles. It’s a compelling sell, but then, so were Wave and Buzz. And this is where I want to talk about what Google is doing differently.
King Chrome
It’s all about this guy. You’ve seen the Chromebook, right? Google is making a serious play for the OS market – one that’s never quite seemed to hang together. Until now. Google+ makes sense of the cloud-based, app-driven strategy: it’s about linking up with Android devices, and Google+ is the missing piece of the puzzle.
Google is looking to build a Chrome ecosystem just as Apple built their own iOS ecosystem. You had an iMac, so you get an iPod, and then it just makes sense to get an iPhone when the decision comes, because they’re designed to work together. Thing is, Chrome has a ridiculous rate of growth in mobile: today they announced they activate 500,000 Android devices every day. That’s half a million. Every day. That’s a whole lot of Google-friendly devices, and the company is really starting to plough resource into bolstering Honeycomb for tablets and next-gen mobiles.
On the more technical side of things, Google also today rolled out a Flash-to-HTML5 converter and new webfonts and design layout. Any one of these announcements would be pretty big news; together, they signpost a glaringly obvious power play. The emphasis on clean usability takes a lot of cues from Apple (indeed, Google have an ex-Apple designer anchoring the team), and it’s clear that Google are keen to solve the problem they’ve always had with social: getting people to actually use the damn thing.
It’s worth remembering here that Google’s Eric Schmidt just got back from Cannes, where he said that results from the company’s tearjerking Superbowl ad ‘shocked’ them. Seriously? Anyway, it’s become clear that Google is now slinging a lot of investment into marketing. I mean, check out how many videos they’ve made just for this release, big though it is. Indeed, check out their second, equally something-in-my-eye advert from earlier this year, along with all the other (more offbeat) stuff they’ve been producing.
But it’s not just straight marketing. Google are clearly taking pains to actively involve their users in the product. When Wave came out, it was amazing. It still is, and it’s still way ahead of its time. But it never made sense to actually use the product; it wasn’t integrated into existing operations in any meaningful way. Google could have started off by targeting businesses, who are crying out for solid, stable multi-editing software – but they didn’t. They kicked it around halfheartedly and never put the drive behind it, assuming people like me who found it awesome would naturally pick it up. Well, I’m a person like me and I haven’t used Wave more than twice ever. With Google+, I’m already seeing how it fits in with my life.
The Life Googlyic
This is the last point I want to make. Google is positioning Google as a lifestyle. Preposterous? Not when you feature vegan baking in one of your promotional videos. Not in red-meat America. Look at those videos again: biking, ‘epic bros’, nerding out, ‘gastronauts’. There’s a guy who uses ‘like’ as, like, punctuation? And the videos link to the Arcade Fire after they finish.
Google are plucking at the strings of a relatively new social demographic: the aspirant geek. Tech-savvy, young, beautiful and hip (not to mention ripe for parody), these people are super-connected, well educated, and not overly careful with money. They’re also into fitness, clean living, doing good and trying to have the quirkiest fun under the sun. Oh, and they hate what everyone else is doing, because they were doing it years ago and it’s so orthodox now. Like San Francisco above, they mix the metropolitan with the bucolic, and to hell with the dissonance. Anyway, dissonance is cool.
Google has made the effort to reject the current framework set by Facebook. In an early Google+ posting, Zee Kane of The Next Web asks,
Interesting that Google decided to replace @ with + when you want to mention someone. e.g +Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten . Anyone know why? (specific post here)
I think I do. To use @ (even though Twitter invented it), like, or even a thumbs-up symbol, would be a tacit submission to Facebook’s reality. And that’s not what Google wants to create. It wants its own ecosystem, with its own rules, populated by Android users on Android devices using Google apps to co-ordinate their lives. It wants to be cooler than Facebook. It wants to do social in the same way that Apple wants to do… well, anything. That is to say, better. And with this more holistic, integrated approach, Google+ is already making a lot more sense than Buzz or Wave ever did.
So look out, world. Google have the talent, the team, enough money to buy a small planet, and – for the first time – the direction.
