Google-Phrenia: A Social Adjustment?
August 31, 2010
I am not a social goose. The goings at Orkut are a mystery to me. I think I signed up, saw lots of Brazilian info, and abandoned ship. No knock against Orkut or Brazil. I just don’t want digital pals unless those pals have a beak and feathers. I read with semi-interest the write up “Google’s Orkut Tweaks Point To Google Me.” The main point is that Google, once again it seems, is gearing up to become the big dinosaur of social media. A big dinosaur will munch on the likes of Facebook and then go hunting for more digital Twinkies. For me, the key passage in this GigaOM write up was:
The Orkut tweaks involve the ability to send photos or updates — which the network calls “scraps” – to specific users or groups of users, instead of to your entire social graph. Whether that kind of feature will help Google or Orkut in its competition against Facebook remains to be seen, however, since the giant social network also allows users to target specific friends or groups.
Sigh. Not the stuff of gooseliness.
I then noticed this write up from the same publication: “Why Google Has No Game.” The idea in this write up I learned that Google is going to have to make some adjustments to shift its Hummer into a lower gear and run down the pesky socially adept services. Buying games is perhaps the long way around the barn next to the pond. The write up has a nifty list of Facebook acquisitions, which I found useful.
My view is that Google has to do something that generates revenue. After 11 years, the one-trick-pony label is starting to bleed into Googzilla’s hide. The notion of getting high marks for “effort” works in Miss Chessman’s 5th grade class in 1955, but it doesn’t work in the world where success is measured by revenue from products and services that users consume like Apples. And search? Search is shifting to mobile voice, asking “friends”, and poking around subset content collections suggested by often clueless users. These different approaches serve to erode the Google brute force methods. That’s the interesting facet of the social shift to this unsocial goose. Google may have a variant of goose-phrenia. I call it Google-phrenia. Maybe there is no cure?
Stephen E Arnold, August 31, 2010
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