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Inside Google Plus



Wired: What have you learned about how people are using Google+?

Google+ is extremely privacy-sensitive and considerate. Those lessons were visceral and hard-won.

Horowitz: We’ve found there is actually twice as much private sharing as there is sharing that’s visible to everyone on the Internet. That’s why sometimes it looks like people sign up and then don’t come back. In fact, they’re sharing with small groups of people that they trust and love. It’s just not publicly visible. So there’s this sort of dark matter that the public can’t see.

Wired: What sorts of problems are people having?

Horowitz: There are two different kinds of experiences. There are the early adopters who are carefully curating their circles. The biggest challenge they face is what we call the noisy-stream problem, in which a few active people overwhelm the conversation. We need some tools to either suppress that noise or present the information in a way that it doesn’t dominate.

But there’s another class of users who are having an empty-stream problem. Either they have not added enough people to their circles, or they have not yet connected to the people that they care about. They’re just not engaging and not visiting enough. We have plans in place to address both ends of that spectrum.

Wired: You call this a field test, but Google+ very quickly attracted 10 million users, and by now it’s many more. How big does it get before you have to say it’s real?

Horowitz: We refer to it as a limited field trial, and it’s limited in several ways. First, apart from the initial seed group, every user has been invited by another user. You need to know somebody in the system to get into the system. But the other sense of the word limited is that what you see now is not the entirety of the feature set.

Wired: What can we expect to see in the future?

Horowitz: Google+ introduces a new means of sharing, and one of the things that people love to share is media. People are already sharing fun media on the service, like animated GIFs. We’re not ready to announce anything now, but I think you can extrapolate and say Google+ is a good way to share mass media as well. That could take the form of people listening or watching something together in Hangouts.

Wired: Have you thought about how you’re going to make money off this?

Horowitz: It’s not the highest priority. And it would be premature to come up with that before we understand how it’s used. But if we do a good job of serving users, we can stick to the Google philosophy that ads are a kind of tax on the product. So, for example, if you and I are talking about where we’re going for dinner on Sunday, and the system is smart enough to recognize the nature of that discussion and offer me a 20 percent discount for a local restaurant, that’s not a nuisance. That’s an incredibly valuable offer.

Wired: Some users are chafing at Google’s insistence that they provide real names. Explain the policy against pseudonyms.

Horowitz: Google believes in three modes of usage—anonymous, pseudonymous, and identified, and we have a spectrum of products that use all three. For anonymity, you can go into incognito mode in Chrome and the information associated with using the browser is not retained. Gmail and Blogger are pseudonymous—you can go be But with products like Google Checkout, you’re doing a financial transaction and you have to use your real name.For now, Google+ falls into that last category. There are great debates going on about this—I saw one comment yesterday that claimed that pseudonyms protect the experience of women in the system. I felt compelled to respond, because I’ve gotten feedback from women who say that the accountability of real names makes them feel much more comfortable in Google+.

Wired: I’ve heard reports that, after the initial boom, usage has leveled off or declined.

Horowitz: Most of those stories are based on wrong data.

Wired: So it’s not leveling off?

Horowitz: We don’t want to get into the game of reacting to every story. That would be a huge distraction. We have our own dashboards, which give us a very clear indication of how the system is behaving and what we need to do to improve it. We have a really strong sense of where we’re going, and enough validation that the snarkiness is not damaging. And while we’re flattered by the early growth, acquiring users has never been an explicit goal for our field trial.

Wired: Now that Google+ has been so well received, do you feel the company has debunked the charge that it doesn’t understand social networking?

Horowitz: Yes. I think that was never true. We’ve had successes and failures in the social space, but I think that blanket charge was unfair. That wasn’t the reason behind those successes and failures.

Wired: It must be particularly gratifying after the Buzz disaster.

Horowitz: I firmly believe that we would not be where we are today with Google+ but for the lessons we learned in Buzz. Google+ is extremely privacy-sensitive and considerate. Those lessons were visceral and hard-won.

Senior writer Steven Levy ( is the author of In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives.