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Can Google really do social?

20 pointslien14y ago4 comments

I had a discussion with a friend who used to work at Google today. We both arrived at the conclusion that Google as a company can't truly make a social product because the people who work there aren't social themselves. (Of course, I am stereotyping and there are outliers in my said assumptions.) We both thought that Google as a company is not built for [1] design, [2] social apps because, as a company, it values opinions coming from the technical, left-brained enginees than right-brained individuals and even institutes a hiring process that picks prospective applicants based on algorithms.

While I believe that technical people are the true innovators of companies in the early stage - and this is exactly what helped Google succeed. At the size that Google is now, it can't rely on a group of employees who are, in many ways, exactly alike. A company at the current size of Google needs diverse thinking to truly innovate and produce social apps.

In order to make a social product, you have to be living it. There are a million of design decisions that goes into making an internet product and, without putting your heart and soul into it, the product is not likely to succeed.

4 comments

4 comments · 4 top-level

grovulent14y ago

Hmm - I think we need to think this claim through a bit before assenting yay or nay. It's just more complex than this.

First of all - let's take your claim that Google engineers aren't social. What really do you mean by this? Break it down a little. You clearly don't mean that they are complete loners that never interact with anyone. Most of them have families and friends... etc.

So there must be some kind of sense of 'social' that you mean - that Google folk don't match. Now - you haven't elaborated, so I can only speculate. But the first thing that comes to mind to me is perhaps like those 18-19 year old girls that never spend a moment without Facebooking, tweeting, sms'ing, etc to their large cadre of similarly obsessed teenage girlfriends. Theirs is a life of duckfaces in pretty dresses. Yep - those folks are pretty damn social. And if THIS is the sort of social you mean - how many Facebook Engineers do you think match this profile? Zuckerberg himself is not exactly known for his extroversion. Yet he built the most successful social network around. And had he been an extroverted college girl that like to post duckfaces, it's much more unlikely that he would have.

Secondly - their is an implicit assumption behind your thinking that sociality is this kind of static thing built into humans that is not contextually determined by environmental circumstance. But it's not. I wrote a long essay about this - if you want in-depth arguments... please read:

http://reviewsindepth.com/2011/07/paul-adams-dunbars-number-...

I believe that online social networks will fundamentally alter sociality - it already has. But to see this one has to be able to think outside the current frameworks of how people relate to one another. This is actually very difficult to do when you're immersed in the current stream of sociality. One actually needs solitude in order to see the potential for new kinds of relationships. And this is a view that I think Zuckerberg himself actually shares, insofar as he thinks that online social networking must push people forward into a brave new world. (not that I necessarily agree with his particular vision).

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_sa...

If you don't really understand what I mean by saying sociality can be altered contextually - I'll give you one example which always helps me think about it, which I take from my essay linked above.

One intuition that we have concerning online social networking is the 'cheapness' of the connections that we make. We tend to laugh at people that have thousands of facebook friends. We say - but they aren't really 'true' friends. What causes this intuition? Well - it comes from the drop in the economic costs in signalling friendship made possible by online social networking. Sure - going out to dinner signals a greater amount of loyalty than just poking someone on Facebook - but poking is still a kind of signal nonetheless, and it signals a kind of relationship.

If you don't agree - consider how things stood around the dawn of language. In order to signal allegiance to other primates, you had to spend a large amount of time grooming other people in your group. The costs of this were so high - you could only signal to a small number of people. But imagine as a thought experiment that we developed language overnight. Now you could just say to people that you were friends - without having to groom them. And this has a much smaller economic overhead. But imagine how it would have appeared to most primates... It would have seemed CHEAP! Such friendships would have been ridiculed. Only the grooming based ones would have been thought authentic. Yet very important kinds of relationships were able to develop on the basis of language - ones that enabled much larger forms of groups. It enabled institutions that would have been scarcely imaginable back then.

So as I see it - what we are building today in our online communities takes a vision that goes beyond what most people can relate to or understand. And this sort of vision requires extraordinary minds - and such people have typically struggled to get along with the common folk.

sandroyong14y ago

Social or social network simply means individuals tied by one or more specific types of interdependencies (ie, friendships, common interests, groups etc). At its basic element, such online networks are repositories of “who I know and this is what I want them to know about me”. But as a network for socializing, does the average user use these networks to really socialize? Yes (and no), but at the very minimum, it generally entails posting updates on one’s life, sharing family/vacation photos, making announcements, all with the intention that the friends/people that we have allowed to share this information will ‘click’ on your bookpage to read about it (note: strangers can visit but not share some info).

This is a ‘one-way’ socialization process. So are (technical/introvert) people who are ‘not sociable’ in real life (as you put it) ‘less qualified’ to produce a social network than their counterparts? Alternatively, you could argue that the people that actively use such social networks are vain, narcissist, an with an underlying desire to measure their self-worth by the number of friends they have (this is stretching it a little, so no disrespect to those who actively use such social networks). So, the techies/introverts may merely be cautious about posting their info online; it does not entirely disqualify them from making social apps.

As I see it, the medium of social networking should be less ‘one-way’ socialization and more like being in the same room with all these people. Facebook, for example, seems more like a room full of people who walk around with a whiteboard obscuring their faces and posting all of their personal info on these whiteboards, ie, we really don’t know if they are who they say they are. Google+ is no more different – it is the same room, minus the whiteboards (because you’ve invited friends to join your circle and, thus, share your info). However, the Google+ room is filled specific/private circles, ie, the ‘cool/popular kids circle’, the ‘nerdy/geeky kids circle’, the ‘rebellious kids circle’ – to use a high school analogy =).

I think there are two arguments here: 1) current online social mediums are not conducive to traditional (‘two-way’) socializing and 2) given a medium that supports ‘two-way’ socializing, everyone can and will be sociable.

dotcoma14y ago

Answer: no.

http://theunderstatement.com/post/11018308302/googles-manage...

rachelbythebay14y ago

It's self-reinforcing. The outliers tend to quit.

Trying to bring about change to make things less creepy from the inside was a tremendous failure.

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