What if Google+ failed because Google already has a social presence?
Type in a search query on Google. You get back some results. What kind of results were those, though? Were they technical, or non-technical? Were you asking Google for advice on a terrible break-up or were you trying to figure out why your computer wasn’t turning on? Almost any non-technical person who needs to search for advice in a relationship establishes an emotional connection to Google based on the way the message was written.
Non-technical people following these types of Google results produces something that robots are incapable of: emotion. Some of these results are from a website that has some emotional and social aspect to it. For example, looking up a YouTube video. People build a strong connection to specific YouTube videos because of the uncontrollable wildfire burning throughout the Comments section of almost any video.
Look at how much emotion was poured into that message! I was almost touched by the last sentence about being a huge fan. Just kidding, I don’t even know who Drake really is. But when non-technical people read these kind of messages, they build an emotional attitude towards that particular entity. People will, through Google, see this video as a connection between the search result (hosted by Google), and that comment. Non-technical people will have a particular emotion with Google for that, because they are the middleman between the person and the result. And as more searches are made, they’ll build a strange set of multiple things they’ve read, such as the comment above.
This is why Google+ failed.
It failed because people already had an existing relationship with Google, and trying to split a company into having two relationships is unlikely. As human beings, we naturally have a single, not multiple, social attitude towards some intangible entity, i.e. a company. Trying to bring Google+ into the existing attitude that people had towards Google couldn’t work. Turning Google from a social experiment into a social network wasn’t going to happen. At least on a large scale, for non-technical people. Perhaps this too is why Google+ was primarily extolled by the technical community…
