Social networks require social movement - can Google get this right?
Google’s attempts to garner a foothold in the social web have been pretty mixed. First Wave dumbfounded, then within a week they have launched Buzz and announced a buy out of social search site Aardvark. But these have been met with skepticism about why we want or need these and even more troubling do we want google to facilitating this? To their credit they are not afraid to fail and committed to develop and progress in this area.
Anyway this got me thinking about which social networks have been succesful and why. I can’t help feel that the growth of the likes of facebook and Twitter, vimeo or flickr has been as much a sense of social movment as new social tools. Joining and being involved in something new, something with momentum, something made by ‘us’ the unknown is exciting and motivating. It is this, as much as the ability to augment social networks, that keeps people coming back and creating the all important social captial. There must be power to maintain connections within a network. I would suggest that google, the ubiquitous search engine, political player, master of the universe cannot create that sense of movement and as such creating facebook or Twitter ‘killers’ by pointing toward added features isn’t going to work. In fact you become the corporate killer of the well loved social networks… Not good for your brand.
So where does google develop it’s social web presence? Well the one area where it has growing set of fans, it feels niche, and is offering something fresh is its growing presence in smart phones and related products. Here there is momentum, it feels like antithesis of the iPhone, and people see it as the open or free option- values that resonate within social web enthusiasts.
Critically, as people move toward a cloud computing space and mobile access devices become the tools to access this, google must harness its expertise and strong equity to provide the best access and mobility within the clouds that people go to.
Rather than provide new spaces of social web, or aggregate social spaces within a singular google space they must provide the best vehicles to move around the various clouds - they will have their own clouds of use but they can also become movement between clouds. They can build that integral sense of social movement and reinvigorate the ‘google’ verb.
