Google Plus

At Google's annual I/O developer conference this week in San Francisco, not all the news has been about code and back-end implementation. At the keynote speech Wednesday, several top dogs from Google took stage to announce consumer-focused changes to Google Maps, Google Now, and the social media platform Google+.

Google+, which launched in June 2011, never took hold of a mass market audience the way I believe Google intended it to. Try as the company might to design a place online that's sort of like Facebook and yet distinctly not Facebook, and doesn't come with the character count limitations of Twitter, it all came too little too late. People just weren't interest in packing up and moving their entire social life elsewhere. Google+ does have a dedicated and active user base, but by and large they comprise employees at Google, developers who work with Google and its products, and people and publications covering fields like technology and science.

The new changes announced for Google+ yesterday were aimed directly at the widest possible market. They included a number of improvements to Hangouts, a feature that is essentially multi-person video chat. Log onto your Google+ account, and you can talk face to face with with your sister in Singapore and your mother in Madrid, simultaneously and for free. One new feature makes Hangouts a texting/messaging platform that works on Android devices, iPhones, and iPads, and also synchronizes cleanly across all those gadgets, so if you delete an incoming message from your Hangout on an iPad, it will also delete automatically from your Android smartphone. Those are the kinds of improvements that consumers now expect and feel frustrated about when they're not there. In other words, no big whoop.

I chatted at the Google I/O after party last night with a developer and asked him about his Google+ usage. He said he likes the service because he gets in-depth updates from high-level people at Google in one place. So it's an aggregator of micro-blogs for him, not really a place to socialize. I also asked him whether the changes announced made any difference to him or if he thought they would attract new users.

"I'm from Argentina originally," he said, "and I still have family there. Data is still really expensive. No one buys the iPhones and Androids because they're too expensive and the service isn't reliable."

He said his family in Argentina still relies on Blackberry model phones from several years ago because they work well given the circumstances. "They don't browse the Web on their phones because it's too expensive and it takes too long anyway for the data to load. So all they really need is WhatsApp, texting, and phone service," he said.

Since Google+ Hangouts isn't supported on Blackberry, there's no reason for him to use it to talk to those people he truly cares about.

I had similar concerns with Google Chromebooks. They're a neat concept—an inexpensive Internet machine—but proved to be totally unreliable the moment you leave a controlled environment, like if you're actually traveling. Or if you live in a place where power and Internet drop out occasionally, as happens in places like India and Southeast Asia, two huge markets for low-cost, Internet-connected computers... and social media platforms. With a Chromebook, you can't pull up help pages and do any troubleshooting if you're not connected to the Internet. And as the Argentine noted, Hangouts messaging isn't supported on Blackberry. Those two facts are showstoppers for millions of people.

That's not to say Google doesn't care about international communities. Several of the developer announcements at Google I/O were specifically about giving app creators better tools for translating their apps to different languages.

In any event, the problem with Google+, in part, is I don't even know whom it's meant to serve. Should it be a mass market social media space, or would it be better off simply leveraging the captive audience it does have? Should it just try to become a social media platform for technology influencers and the people who want updates from them and let go of the dream of attracting a wider audience?

What I really see Google doing lately is making Google+ so integrated with other Google services that you have no choice but to have a Google+ account. It's already indecipherable from a Google ID. Some of the new features in Google Now and Google Maps, like the ability to see "landmarks important to you near your home" by default on your maps home screen and getting restaurant recommendations from "friends" rely on having some personal and social input entered into your Google account.

So whether you like it or not, you'll be using Google+ in some capacity sooner or later if you use Google and any of its many (and quite wonderful) services. Don't like that? It's simple enough to use Bing, Facebook, Twitter, Outlook or Yahoo Mail and avoid the Google-verse. Don't worry: You won't be missing any important updates from your friends and family.