Google Social Media Failed Again?

In the past 10 years we have seen social media come and go, became popular and disappear and re-appear and dies again, Myspace is a good example of that. They are almost the first to come into the game, millions of people flock to it, especially the sexual predators. Then comes HotOrNot, and as we all can probably tell by the name of the site what it is. But problem with them was, it wasn't free. It is almost like a precursor to eHarmony or other dating site without the research and matching by criteria. And soon we have emergence of Facebook, with targeted audience and have exclusivity. But as they evolve and move away from the exclusivity, they basically created another Myspace.

In the past 5 years, Google had made many attempted to break into the social media world, Google Social Media Attempts. Starting with Google Dodgeball. I personally have no experience with this, but from what I can understand it is basically the precursor to Google Latitude. Then comes Okurt, which has more people in the Asia's then US, so I can't comment on their success, but I definitely can comment on how horrible the UI is, and its no more than a Myspace clone. As the years move forward, we were introduced to Google Wave. The UI was clunky and the interface is slow. Within 2 weeks of using it, I lost complete interest, and seems like that was the trend for the rest of the users too. As of now, Google Wave will be turned off by end of the year. FAILED. Google Buzz was their first attempt to upstage twitter. Only problem was, Twitter was already matured, and their users are content, and their business model has been solid. So for Google to re-invent the wheel, extremely silly. I think Google need to have some of their intelligent software engineer teach their business managers the DRY method. FAILED.

Recently, Google introduce Google+. My first impression was, why so exclusive to all the nerds on the internet that doesn't grow your business model? While facebook uses Harvard as an exclusivity, but their user base includes all who has a Harvard email address. The Smarty, nerdy, suicidal, goth, preppy, beauty queen wanna be, past and current professors and so on. So their exclusivity was not limited and the diversity of people will attract others. While Google's exclusivity model is all the interested developers, beta testers, nerdy techies, and high internet usage people. I think any socialable people can see where this is going. None of those people are very socialable. Most of them are more involved with their online WOW character than real life friends. Most of those people are more worry about their ego trip, and how many friends they have, vs actually talking to any of those friends. So yes, in initial launch, you'll see a big influx of people, and lot of connections to each other, but thats about the extend of all they do. They don't go on and say, I just F**k so and so, and we done it this way. Or I just went to have dinner at Jonny Rocket and I feel like I weight a thousand pound from their oily burgers. Not too many post real life event which makes a social media. Those people on their repost videos, repost blogs, repost... How socialable is that? And for those who actually post a socialable event, it pretty much get subsided because of all those other garbage posts. not FAILED yet, but I can see the end of the tunnel for Google+.

As we see a lot of their social media comes and go, every time Google would introduce something new and cool, but never something that is wow, only Google has this. Google Wave has an instant updating and rolling conversation. Making it feel like you are in a chat room. Unfortunately, their speed and resource requirement killed that. Google Buzz, was cool because it is integrated with the rest of your Google stuff, making uploading pictures much easier. But problem is, its not something new, and a few conveniences would not make people want to convert from what they are comfortable with and have a built up user base. And Google+ is pretty advance in some of their ideas, but nothing special about it. It doesn't have friend's bday reminder, it doesn't tell people you are in a relationship with someone. It doesn't have an easy way to link up your photos or post existing photo from other sites. Facebook has all this and has these things for years. If Google want that Wow factor, they need to step up, make something new, look at their competitors and make sure they have everything that makes their competitors better. Maybe then will their users come and stay. Google+ is a great idea, but sadly it was not thought out and will be another social media failed attempt.