Although Google+ is still only a few months old, there seem to be plenty of people willing to write it off as doomed, or close to it. Steve Rubel of Edelman says that he has given up on it, Robert Scoble says that its brand pages are a mess, and Farhad Manjoo at Slate argues that it is all but dead — killed by its failure to offer enough right out of the gate. While it would be tempting to agree that Google has flubbed yet another attempt at social networking, since its track record in that area is so famously underwhelming, there are good reasons to believe that Google+ will be around for awhile. If anything, it is only beginning to show its real power.

Rubel says that he has quit the network because there just isn’t enough going on there in terms of engagement, and so he has retreated to his Tumblr blog and to Twitter (Rubel, the head of digital strategy for the global Edelman PR agency, recently nuked his blogs and switched over to Tumblr as his main communications channel). Others, including Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have also complained that Google+ doesn’t offer enough to make it worth their while, and that the “signal-to-noise” ratio on the network is too low, despite Google’s circle-based follower system.

For his part, Robert Scoble says that Google’s rollout of brand pages is flawed in a number of crucial ways, despite the fact that the company has been working on this feature for some time, and has an obvious model for how pages should work in Facebook. Scoble notes that pages can’t be added to or modified by more than one person — which makes them difficult to use for companies with social-media teams — and others have pointed out that Google’s policies currently prevent brands from offering contests or promotions directly on their Google+ pages, which seems shortsighted at best.

Is Google+ fatally flawed? Far from it
Manjoo, meanwhile, seems to be arguing that all of these flaws mean that Google’s “beta mode” approach has failed them, and that Google+ is functionally crippled to the point where it will never be able to compete with Facebook. As he puts it:

Although Google seems determined to keep adding new features, I suspect there’s little it can do to prevent Google+ from becoming a ghost town. Google might not know it yet, but from the outside, it’s clear that G+ has started to die

I’m far from being the biggest supporter of Google+ (Scoble seems to be happy to claim that role). I’m still not convinced that enough “normals” — i.e. non-geeks — are going to adopt the platform, despite the fact that Google says it has more than 40 million users, and there are a number of things that have bugged me about the service, including the company’s steadfast refusal to allow pseudonyms until recently. I also haven’t found the signal-to-noise ratio to be all that high, despite my use of Circles — but then, it took me two years before I got Twitter to the point where it was providing a consistently high signal.

But the problem with many of these criticisms — as with Manjoo’s premature obituary writing — isn’t just that social networks take time to evolve, and users need time to find out what they are useful for and what they aren’t useful for (Twitter is a perfect example of that, since its own creators didn’t really know what it was for when they built it). The problem is that they are seeing Google+ as JASN: just another social network. So Manjoo seems to be saying that Google has no chance because Facebook is too well established, has too many features, too many users, etc.

Google has some powerful levers yet to pull

But Google has made it clear that it has a lot bigger plans for Google+ than just making it a Facebook clone. Chairman Eric Schmidt has said the company wants to make the network an identity platform for all of its properties — something it is already in the process of doing by integrating it into products like Google Reader — and is building support for it into search as well, with the launch of what it calls “Direct Connect,” which will allow users to go from a search result to a company’s Google+ page with a single click. Can Facebook offer that?

And that’s likely just the beginning: Google could easily extend the integration of Google+ into its Chrome browser, as some have speculated it might, and it hasn’t even turned on what could be one of the biggest drivers of adoption — namely, integration with Gmail. That’s hundreds of millions of people being connected to Google+ immediately from their email inbox, another thing that Facebook can’t offer (it has tried moving into unified messaging as a way of increasing its hold over users, but so far the jury is out on that strategy).

As Edd Dumbill of O’Reilly argued recently, Google is pretty well positioned to turn Google+ into a “social backbone” — something far more advanced and pervasive than just a social network. Obviously Facebook would like to fill this kind of function as well, but it is missing many of the crucial ingredients that Google has, and it is also a much more walled-garden approach, which could impede its progress. Facebook is more than happy to have you build apps and services that work on Facebook, but it is a lot less interested in being open than Google is, and that makes it a somewhat harder sell.

So yes, Google+ is noisy for some, and for others is a ghost town. Many of its features are raw and need work, like the brand page rollout. But Google is not just trying to build a place to share photos of your cat — it wants Google+ to be a social layer for everything it does, and it has some powerful levers it can pull when it comes to encouraging people to use it, such as search and email. The full impact of that integration remains to be seen, but it is far too soon to call the network dead or a loser. It’s barely even the third inning.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users World Economic Forum

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Social networks seemed poised to take over the Web. This year, Facebook reached 800 million users. LinkedIn went public in a blockbuster stock offering. Twitter produced a billion tweets per week. And Google launched its own social network, Google+, attracting 25 million users in one month.

Amid the continued growth of these social networks, there has been much excitement about how the rest of the Web would soon be infused with all things "social": social search, social commerce, social deals and more. And yet the effort to socialize the rest of the Web has so far failed to live up to its promise. Why?

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How Will Social Networks Evolve? What Services Will They Deliver?

David Rogers is consultant, speaker, and author of "The Network Is Your Customer." He teaches at Columbia Business School and has advised numerous companies such as SAP, Eli Lilly, and Visa. This article originally ran on The Network, Cisco's Technology News Site. The contents or opinions in this feature are independent and do not necessarily represent the views of Cisco.Facebook's master plan, articulated by founder Mark Zuckerberg, was that once its site had built a map of everyone you've met or known, you would be able to leverage that information across the Web, to see what your "friends" are searching, buying, watching, liking or saying.

Since 2008, Facebook has attempted to roll out this strategy by using "Facebook Connect" to extend its social graph into millions of other websites, and by incorporating new functionality into its own site. Yet many of the most anticipated social integrations so far have failed to take off:

Social commerce: When Delta Airlines launched a Facebook "ticket window" last year, it was seen as the future of e-commerce, with every ticket purchase shared socially to the customer's friends. Yet, one year later, nearly all of us still buy our tickets on dedicated airline or travel sites.
Social search: When the Bing search engine started highlighting Web pages that the user's Facebook friends "liked," it heralded the arrival of a long-awaited "social search." Yet, the fraction of "liked" pages was so tiny that the social feature was nearly invisible.
Social deals: When Facebook moved into the daily deals space, it was seen as a potent challenger to Groupon. But four months later, Facebook announced it was closing its local deals business.
Social viewing: When Facebook offered its first streaming movie this spring, on a Time Warner Facebook app, it was heralded as an opportunity to make movie viewing social. Yet, this experiment failed to produce much customer interest.

At last week's F8 conference, Facebook unveiled much more ambitious efforts to integrate outside web brands into its site - from a full-fledged Netflix movie player, to a music player drawing on Spotify and several other streaming music services.

But for any of these, or other social integrations to succeed, Facebook and its partners and rivals will need to learn from past mistakes. To date, their vision of how to make the Web more social has been based on a fundamental misunderstanding of our digital behavior.But for any of these, or other social integrations to succeed, Facebook and its partners and rivals will need to learn from past mistakes. To date, their vision of how to make the Web more social has been based on a fundamental misunderstanding of our digital behavior.

Understanding Social Graphs vs. Interest Graphs

In order for social networks to truly reshape our experience of the rest of the Web, developers must first understand the relationship between our social graphs and our interest graphs.

A social graph is a digital map that says, "This is who I know." It may reflect people who the user knows in various ways: as family members, work colleagues, peers met at a conference, high school classmates, fellow cycling club members, friend of a friend, etc. Social graphs are mostly created on social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, where users send reciprocal invites to those they know, in order to map out and maintain their social ties.

An interest graph is a digital map that says, "This is what I like." As Twitter's CEO has remarked, if you see that I follow the San Francisco Giants on Twitter, that doesn't tell you if I know the team's players, but it does tell you a lot about my interest in baseball. Interest graphs are generated by the feeds customers follow (e.g. on Twitter), products they buy (e.g. on Amazon), ratings they create (e.g. on Netflix), searches they run (e.g. on Google), or questions they answer about their tastes (e.g. on services like Hunch).

Photo by duchesssa

Next page: The Fallacy of Social Web 1.0

The Fallacy of Social Web 1.0

The fundamental stumbling block of the social Web to date is that it has conflated social graphs with interest graphs. But in reality, who you know does not always translate into what you will like.

For example, I have a particular taste in movies. But I do not share that same taste with most of the people whom I have friended on Facebook - a motley mix of high school classmates, work colleagues, PTA committee members, and fellow jazz buffs. Nor do we, as a large and heterogeneous group, all share the same taste in travel, or fashion, or much of anything else. So when Facebook attempts to improve my movie-viewing experience by revealing the tastes of everyone in my entire social graph, the value to me is quite low.

The fundamental stumbling block of the social Web to date is that it has conflated social graphs with interest graphs. But in reality, who you know does not always translate into what you will like.The Future of the Social Web: Integrating the Graphs

So far, the job of mapping users' social graphs has been taken up by social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Meanwhile, interest graphs have been best built by e-commerce sites such as Netflix and Amazon that focus on highly customized recommendations.

The future of a truly social Web will rely on getting these two types of graphs to work together. We are just starting to see some interesting attempts at this:

Social circles: On Google+, users explicitly place each member of their social graph into one or more "circles" based on common interests and the type of content they want to share with them. In response, Facebook has just re-launched its own feature to manage social circles.
Feed lists: Twitter's lists feature allows users to create sublists of people and brands to follow based on different topics (e.g. news headlines, favorite celebrities, fellow sports fanatics, or authors you admire).
Single-purpose graphs: Niche services aim to map out just one particular circle of shared interest, such as micro-social-network Path (for mapping your 50 closest friends), or social music site Turntable.fm (for sharing playlists with likeminded music lovers).

In the near future, we should see new and better solutions to integrating social and interest graphs.


For Now, Pick the Right Graph

Until this kind of integration is achieved, though, Web services should consider carefully when to utilize the customer's social graph, and when to use their interest graph.

Then the service should pick the graph that adds value to the customer experience. Because the real social Web will be all about the customer.

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"Our ambition is to up-level the model of social networking. We want to support asymmetric relationships with brands and celebrities - but we also wanted to support intimate communication with real life friends and family. Could we do both of those things? Being all things to all people is the path to hell - but could we do it?"

-Bradley Horowitz of Google

Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product Management and a leader of the Google Plus social network, said a lot of very interesting things today in an interview with Tim O'Reilly at the Strata Summit on Big Data. One of the most interesting, though, was to quietly introduce the data scientist behind Google Plus and its future development. Dr. Andrew Tomkins (above) used to be the Chief Scientist of Search at Yahoo but two years ago left and joined Google. No one noticed. At least no one indexed by Google News. Today we learned what Tomkins has been doing since joining Google. He's nerding-out on social network user activity data and gathering observations to help Google Plus aim to be all things to all people. Andrew Tomkins is charting the path to hell.

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Plus as Data-Driven

"We have a complex service that contains a lot of components and we want to do it in a data-driven way," Horowitz told O'Reilly on stage this afternoon. "You'll begin to see data-driven insights come out into the light of day soon, based on a bleeding edge understanding of how people are using social networks. We have a research team lead by Andrew Tomkins, who is one of the great data scientists and who is coming up with insights that are informing the development of our service."

What kinds of data is the Tomkin's Plus research team surfacing so far? Horowitz noted several in his interview.
Users of Plus are two to three times as likely to post content to private circles than they are to post it publicly. In other words, the numbers say the Circles metaphor is working so far.The new Search functionality will in the future identify topic experts, based on algorithmic analysis of the things they discuss and other signals.Automatic prioritization of social contacts: "We have great data to determine who you really care about. The phone contacts list is key. The data belongs to the users though and we need to find the best way to serve it up to them."

Horowitz and O'Reilly talked dreamily about a sensor-rich future where almost unimaginable technologies were built on tidal waves of data. "Imagine we all opted-in and donated our microphone sensors in this room to capture an aggregate of data," he imagined. "There will be sensors like dust everywhere and it will be [technologists' job] to harvest that data and return it as killer apps."

Who's Andrew Tomkins?

Andrew Tomkins, whose time at Yahoo overlapped with Horowitz and who's worked at IBM as well, is quoted in Steven Levy's deep dive coverage of Plus at launch regarding Sparks, the persistent search feature that sounded today like it was going to get a refresh as part of the launch of search.

Horowitz said today that Tomkins leads the Plus research team, is one of the best in the business and that research is going to drive future development and publicly shared insights in the near term future.

Tomkins got a Computer Science undergrad degree from MIT in the late 80's, then a CS PhD from Carnegie Mellon in the 90's. He's co-authored 12 research papers about data mining published across 9 different publications in the past 10 years.

But he has only shared one post publicly, outside of Circles, on Google Plus - ever. He's followed by two hundred people on that service and not a single journalist (until this afternoon, at least). He seems quite open to talking to press, though, so hopefully I'll follow up with him after today and offer a more detailed discussion of his thinking.

None the less, if Paul Adams, former Googler turned Facebook employee and author of the widely-read presentation that inspired the Circles metaphor, is the philosophical granddaddy of the hot new social network - it sounds like Andrew Tomkins could be the man who is leading the young service into a data-driven future.

Good luck, Dr. Tomkins, may you build something that is all things to all people. And if "don't be evil" seems an antiquated Google slogan, then perhaps we should say...may it not in fact be a path to hell.

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IPhone photo sharing application Instagram announced today that it has hit 1 million registered users, a mere 10 weeks after the app launched to the public. The company had all kinds of odds against it, yet here it is - fast growing and widely loved. As M.G. Siegler wrote in a good profile of Instagram today, it took Foursquare a year to hit 1 million users and Twitter, two years.

Only time will tell how well this relatively simple app holds up its market share in the crowded world of mobile photo sharing. Its users like the filters it offers, the community they find there and the ease of cross-posting Instagrammed photos out to other networks like Flickr, Facebook and Foursquare. It's really as simple as that; and look at all the reasons that logic would imply that it shouldn't have worked.

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The team started out working on something very different. Originally a standards-centric, well-designed, meta location-based social network called Burbn, the company now informally known as Instagram just made it under the line weeks before people starting complaining loudly that the word "pivot" had grown cliche. But pivot they did, and clearly very well.

Right: Last night my wife made roasted beets, brussel sprouts and parsnips for our lunar eclipse Solstice dinner. You better believe I Instagrammed it. Not pictured is goat cheese with fig sauce on walnut bread.

The Instagram website is terrible. You can't view a user's other photos, you can't zoom in to see photos full-sized, you can't follow people on the web and have them appear on your phone, you can't....well, you can't do nearly anything from the Instagram web pages. Except download the iPhone app, which a million people have.

The company doesn't own instagram.com. Some bottom-feeding domain squatting slimebag does. That means poor Instagram has to promote the website www.instagr.am and that's just not easy to remember.

They take one of the best mobile phone cameras on the market and they muddy up its photos. Laurie Voss points out that even the iPhone's camera is pretty bad, but Instagram just encourages users to make it worse. "In forty years' time you're going to look back at these photos and love them no matter what," he writes. "And you'll wonder why the f* ck. you thought wrapping a white border and splashing a pink blob over them was a good idea."

Right: One of my favorite of many pieces of art at my mother in law's house. A visit to her place always leaves my Instagram app exhausted.

There are loads of mobile photo filter thingy apps already. We compared a number of them in November and found that Instagram does not have the best feature set. It might have the nicest aesthetic, though.

Instagram's investors decided to back one of its competitors. Oops, high-profile investors Andreesen Horowitz were interested in funding location-service Burbn, but in the mobile social photo space they decided they'd rather fund Instagram competitor PicPlz, founded by experienced entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell, former CEO of music service Imeem. That's not good for business.

A competitor was named the iPhone app of the year by Apple. Competing app Hipstamatic does roughly the same thing that Instagram does and to be honest, it has a much cooler (probably fake, marketing b.s.) background story. Hipstamatic charges $1.99 for its app, has been available for about a year and reports that it has 1.4 million users.

Right: Seeing Broken Bells at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, Oregon. How Instagramtastic!

Despite all this, after just 10 weeks Instagram has an impressive 1 million users! There's no Android app, you can't zoom in on any of the pictures, if you use it to check-in on Foursquare then you miss out on all the other features of Foursquare. The list of reasons why Instagram shouldn't have succeeded go on and on. But here we are. Or rather, there I am. I'm @marshallk on Instagram. See you there!

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