Year in Review: Part 2

While I’m making my Silicon Valley enemies, I’m going to tee up Google as well.

A year ago, I wrote about Google’s growth from a spunky up-start, to a Microsoft-esque behemoth, signaled by CEO Eric Schmidt’s dismissing of the then-early Twitter phenomenon. The hardest part of becoming a giant and the leader in the field is remaining connected to your customers and continuing to capture market through empathy rather than force or coercion.

It’s been quite a year. Google’s initial launch of Buzz was classic brute-force Microsoft, and not far removed from Facebook’s overly-aggressive tactics I wrote of in my last post. Google made several blunders that have been heavily written about.  Like Facebook, they defaulted all of their users to opt-out, not just to the service but to all of the features. Thinking like engineers, not users, they blasted users with all of the functionality they could think of, and connected users automatically with everyone in their respective networks. Like Facebook, their failure was in a misunderstanding of network value and in a lack of empathy for their users. Current network theory states that the more connections between nodes and the more content the higher the value of a network. It is only natural Google would want to kick start their network with as many connections and as much content as possible. The backlash is a perfect test of my network model, one in which value is destroyed by the wrong connections and wrong content. As my colleague in frogNY, Adam Silver, pointed out to me, Gmail contains ALL of your contacts: social, familial, professional, random. Even more than physical social circles, users want to keep these groups separate. Connecting them by default creates value under the current network theory, but destroys value under my network theory.

Unlike Facebook, I do think Google realizes the problem and quickly tried to rectify it, throttling back features, defaulting to opt-in, and generally taking a much more careful approach that indicates they’ve been listening to their users even if they aren’t formally re-examining their social network strategy and assumptions on value. At the same time, they continue to trip up over privacy. While these are minor slip-ups they can be catastrophic in aggregate. User trust is essential in attracting high value content and connections, which is where social networks derive true strength and monetary potential. Google must continue to tread lightly, prioritize the protection of the trusted brand they’ve built so carefully, and always default to consumer advocacy over aggressive growth.