I understand the fun of calling it Scoble+ and all, but how many people need to obviously use and sign up for G+ before we stop (I can't believe we didn't even give it much more than 6 months chance!) calling Google+ a failure? It may never meet Facebook's user numbers, but over 100 million people have signed up, millions use it every day, photographers have taken to it so much so that soon it looks like it will pass Facebook in daily photo uploads despite having a fraction the user base...how's that for a 'feature' to draw users? Strongest online community of photographers? (You can thank Yahoo!'s failures with Flickr for that, probably.) Google+ may yet "fail" in the end, but when all signs point to continued growth (dare I say "strong"? 750k per day according to Paul Allen on G+) and it's only been 8 months...can we maybe not call it a failure yet? Unless anything that doesn't have 800 million users is a failure, in which case every blog that reports on start-ups can close their doors and replace their front page with "Company [x] is gonna fail. Back to New York Times?" :)

[...] to help introduce real-time searching. -  A look at why the older technology companies will never win the battle of social media, despite their efforts. - Amazon expected to start selling 10-inch Kindle Fire before the summer, to help compete against [...]

Reblogged this on MesaBoogie007.

[...] tradotto da The Older You Are, The Harder It Is To Win At Social, di Trevor Gilbert. Post correlati:L’ascesa del Social SpamSo.cl, il social network di [...]

[...] tradotto da The Older You Are, The Harder It Is To Win At Social, di Trevor [...]

[...] tradotto da The Older You Are, The Harder It Is To Win At Social, di Trevor [...]

[...] tradotto da The Older You Are, The Harder It Is To Win At Social, di Trevor [...]

Really with the scarf, Trevor? What are you, a 50 year-old woman?

What about Instagram? It's tied only to the iPhone and is having TONS of success.

There's another easier explanation. "Winning at social" is as much chance as intent. If you have 500 companies trying 500 different things and 5 of them win, the chances that it will be one of the big established players is pretty small. Even the small payers like Path iterate multiple times before finally "catching". The big players do fool themselves into thinking it's working just because they start with such an advantage of being able to bring critical mass instantly, but fooling themselves is about their only disadvantage. They would do far better to pay up for social networks that already work and hypercharge them (read: YouTube, which was a successful acquisition).

[...] Gilbert, explaining in beautifully curt form just why major companies like Apple and Google are so awful at ...: “people want to be on the same network as their friends, and they can’t be if their [...]

Why was this article on techmeme?

Actually, Microsoft IS planning on releasing Office for iPad (but not for Android tablets): http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/02/21/022112-tech-apps-office/

http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/02/21/022112-tech-apps-office/ Ehh.

They don't need to 'win', they just need to know how to leverage social. Although, win-in-social is a relative term. Apple 'wins' via social because their great products have tremendous word-of-mouth effect, and the marketing feeds on itself. But they 'fail' in the tech sense of 'social'. (How do you quantify the unquantifiable? Profits? Sales?)

> They are working on a version of Microsoft Office for tablets, but apparently have no plans to release it for the iPad or iPhone. Why? microsoft has been producing apple software for decades (before DOS) and office for ipad is about to be announced. what you are describing is both apple and microsoft as being vertical, when they are at polar ends of the distribution spectrum with one being the proto-vertical and the other the proto-horizontal (they each pioneered their model). that said, I don't think the reason why Microsoft and Apple haven't produced a successful social network is because of their software distribution models. It is more because one of them hasn't really tried and the other owns a good slice of the most popular one (and is in the same keiretsu)

This is a great topic to cover, Trevor... however you have 8 paragraphs of "setup" with a three sentence "payoff." In other words, WHERE'S THE BEEF?

First we have to consider these so called social networks. While som special-case ones may be useful - most are not. Even if you have a consistent social graph for anyone you still need to know the context. I and all my friends might be vegans - but the search engine doesn't know context when I look for a restaurant. I may be looking for dinner with a client. And in a generic social application like Facebook you don't have a consistent social graph. Sure many of them has friends in them. But many, many others use Facebook to keep contact with distant relatives, old school friends and colleagues you never see or hear from. In this case the social graph is an anti-social-graph. VC:s love social. The software is simple and hit-oiented. A few of them will be runaway hits. This is what VC:s like. But do not mix the VC-world with the world of actual serious software products.

I would add the need to have a cool name and be a cool company.

Wow, some big comments here. All I wanted to say was... that picture is a WIN!

There is one huge reason Google, Microsoft, and Apple will not win at social. The investors behind Facebook, Twitter and others would do anything to have 10,000% gains on exit. Then you have the people who bought options on secondmarket.com. Then you have Goldman Sachs, and the other underwriters who were actually stopped by the SEC for selling shares to US customers short of a public offering years before the S-1 was filed. GOOG, MSFT, AAPL will never see returns like a startup exit. They've already been split multiple times. Yes, the original theFacebook.com did gain hundred of thousands of followers on it's own merit, but so did myyearbook, fubar, and countless others. The rest was wholly on the back of pump & dumpers. The pump & dumpers got it on CNN, and in the mainstream media channels. Nobody's going to stand to make enough money to do that for Microsoft barring Bill Gates who at this point really doesn't car. Larry Page obviously cares, but there aren't enough people to care with him at Google who stand to make money off of it. It all boils down to money. This is America.

There is another, more prosaic explanation for the failure of almost everyone in the world to build a successful social network - if you start late, it is almost impossible to overtake a competitor who is enjoying greater network effect (unless they screw up, i.e. Friendster, Myspace, Bebo, etc.) Google, Apple and Microsoft were all simply too late to the party. There is a perception that there are several successful networks, but really there is now only one of each kind. LinkedIn for professional networking, Facebook for shooting the shit with your friends and wasting time, Twitter for blurting to the masses. The only way to create a new social network now is to find a new model that's not one of the above. Google+ has not attempted to do that, instead they've created a hybrid that has a bit of all of the above and some other stuff like hangouts chucked in for good measure. There's no reason to believe that strategy is going to work for them.