Jeff Bullas’s piece on whether Google’s new Google+ marks an all-out war between Facebook and the search giant for dominance in social media raises some important issues. Bullas points to the demise in popularity of MySpace as a precedent for Google’s need to be concerned. From a technical point of view, I can see why Google+ can be perceived as an intervention in the social media space and as a challenge to the incumbent Facebook. But I think seeing it in that context alone risks missing the wider environment within which this struggle may well be taking place.
I’m not convinced that it’s about the fact that Google wants to necessarily get into the social media space. Rather, they may believe they have no choice but to have a presence – and a successful presence – there in order to defend their very business model. In other words, whilst this may look like another attempt to gain a foothold in an arena that Google has attempted to enter several times before, I see it being much more about Google absolutely having to get this right.
A key reason is the “war of the worlds” I spoke about a few posts back. We are now seeing a number of globally scaled brands building their platforms into ecosystems – Apple’s move into the cloud, Microsoft’s Azure project and Windows 8 initiatives, and Facebook’s Like strategy and its pending mobile developments. All of these developments signal a move to draw users into integrated, multi-purpose, branded environments where so many of each brand’s followers’ needs are catered for that they don’t need to look or source further afield.
Remember though that Google cannot easily search Facebook. That means Google is closed out of that search space. And if hundreds of millions of users cannot use Google within their favourite social media channel, they will look to Facebook to fulfil and potentially expand that function for them.
Couple that exclusivity with a fall in web-related searches generally and I think we’re closer to the real cause of Google’s alarm. Increasingly, people are searching for subjects, information and communities from within their favourite social media platforms. That signals that potentially the very way that we search is changing. And such a trend makes social media very relevant indeed to Google, because of course it represents a fundamental challenge to Google’s business model. Google either makes effective and substantive social media searching available themselves or risks being subsumed in a massive fall-off in web-related search numbers.
As Jeff Bulas concludes, “maybe [Google’s] long term existence and continuing relevance hinges on it becoming part of people’s social networks and not just a search engine.”
Part of the reason of course is that social networks by their very nature bring people together around subjects of interest and get them talking amongst themselves. In the process, they seek each other out, seek each other’s opinions, seek updates and news, and look for technical information and so much more from within their social communities. They are doing their own searching – but not with Google.
There is still that very real sense of mass. But it’s a sense of mass whose media physics continues to evolve.
Today, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Apple run pixellated empires – massive globally-scaled brands, huge and solid to look at from a distance, but on closer examination made up of millions and millions of individuals, who are in turn each talking about, connecting with and searching for what is special and important and precious to them within their favourite swirling media cloud.
In a little over ten years, we’ve moved from thinking dot-com was a business model to recognising that the business model of the future will probably pivot on how many dots there are and how those dots are joined.
