10 June 2014

GigaOm: “Memo to Eric Schmidt: Being Social is Not a Widget”

Why? Because to truly be successful, social media or social networking — which Google has apparently come to realize is an important feature of the web as it exists today, and a competitive threat as well (sub req’d) — can’t just be bolted onto what you are already doing. It’s not a software upgrade or a hardware fix. Schmidt makes adding social features sound like something Google can accomplish by tweaking an algorithm here and there, or adding a new widget (possibly even a Facebook plugin). But he is wrong. Mathew Ingram

A couple of days ago I discovered this article saved in my browser bookmarks and was struck but how good it anticipated the struggles of Google+, which was still a secret internal project back in 2010 when the article was published. After its project manager and main supporter left in April and with the CEO distancing himself from the project, the future of Google+ looks more uncertain by the day.

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