With more than 40 million users now, Google+ is admittedly flabbergasted. "We're surprised--that's above our internal projections, even our wildest projections," says Gundorta. He acknowledged that the speed at which the service took off left them a little flat-footed. As of now, you can sign up for Google+ using your personal Gmail login but not a Google Apps identity linked to the domain of a business or other organization. Because of this mishap, Google effectively snubbed some of its most loyal users, many of them paying customers.
Gundorta has issued a personal apology for the aforementioned, also saying that the integration with Google Apps wasn’t initially a high priority, but a solution is now “imminent, within days.” In another Web 2.0 interview, former Facebook president Sean Parker said that Google+ would have a hard time overcoming the network effect achieved by Facebook. In reply, Gundorta was quoted saying, “The point Sean made is right, that the incumbent has a huge advantage. If you play the same game, that’s a hard game to win. We’re going to play a different game.” (Gundorta’s strategy will be to make Google+ a social layer on top of everything else Google already offers.) “What we’ve seen so far is just the ‘plus’ part, but in the coming months the rest of Google will come to bear the product,” he said.
Obviously one thing Google has going in its direction would be the fact that they already have so many users of other Google services that can easily be targeted to hopefully attract them to a new social network.
Google will also stick to a more “deliberate” model for sharing, straying away from Facebook’s new Open Graph frictionless sharing (where some news and music apps now automatically share links through the content you access though them). "We think there is a reason why every thought in your head does not come out of your mouth. I don't want the world to know that I'm embarrassed I like that one Britney Spears song. I want the world to know that I like U2," said Gundorta.
Even though Taylor thinks that Facebook is already way ahead of providing what Google is now trying to integrate, he did say that after listening to Vic and Sergey speak about the integration into a variety of Google properties, it sounded like a great strategy to him. Taylor thinks that more and more services will have a social context, with Facebook being the frontrunner at the moment.
Facebook has also been accused of violating user privacy, but Taylor points out that most avid Facebook users have changed their privacy settings, and that they are not hidden away from the user at all. “Our policy is not to bury them (the privacy settings), but to put them in front of you as much as possible,” said Taylor.
I’m not sure what most people view Google+ as lately, but as a college student I rarely hear too much about it around campus or in discussions with friends nearly as much as I do Facebook. That may be obviously because of how incredibly popular Facebook is, with college students especially, but it seems as though Google had quite a mishap when it was found by many paying members of services through them that they could be denied a Google+ account. There’s no tip-toeing around the fact that if Google+ wants to be competitive with Facebook, they’re the ones next in line to have the best shot of doing so (after Twitter).
It will be interesting in the following days, months, years, to see how well they deal with this new service they’re attempting to provide. After reading this article and others, it really just seems like a lot of it is Google controlling their own destiny, and most of the hypothetical success to be seen with Google+ is theirs to lose.
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