Google+ has promise for social networking

SAN JOSE, Calif. – If not for Google’s first three flops at social networking, the search giant might never have come up with a viable challenge to Facebook and Twitter.

Google’s fourth and most ambitious attempt at social networking has set Silicon Valley abuzz, with membership soaring past 10 million people in just three weeks. Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, the two executives in charge of Google+, said in an interview that they closely studied Google’s previous failures with Orkut, Wave and Buzz to find a better approach.

Google+ ranks as one of the most important product launches in the company’s history as it tries to catch up with the booming success of 750 million member Facebook and other social sites, and the threat they represent to Google’s advertising business. Google+ is the centerpiece of a companywide master plan to reboot Google for a modern Web that is increasingly about connecting with people as well as information.

Although the numbers for Google+ are impressive, Gundotra and Horowitz said it’s far too soon to declare Google+ a winner. “We’re Google. We can get anybody to kick the tires of a product,” said Gundotra, the Internet giant’s top social networking executive. “It doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful.”

Sitting in Building 2000 on the Googleplex, where they assembled the team in June 2010 to build Google+, the two executives talked about the leap of faith they made, and the team of engineers and designers that built the network.

“We’ve got some great characters here,” Gundotra said. “Good people who are gelling together as a team. I think that’s a part of the story that has never been told. People don’t get how magical this team is. How we came together in the course of the past year to become friends.

“We’re a heated team, a passionate team, lots of good fights, but it’s a team that is pretty amazing.”

Experts agree it’s too early to call the social network a hit, even though its popularity helped push Google stock up 13 percent last week.

But the stakes have rarely been higher for Google. Social networking flops like Wave and Buzz are “the glaring failure in their history – the thing they had failed to do – which was to bring people into their products,” said Steven Levy, who followed the Google+ team, code-named “Emerald Sea,” as he reported his new book, “In the Plex.” “In the heads of all the people at Google, right up to the very top, it became clear that this was something that was essential to Google’s very survival.”

Gundotra and Horowitz said Google’s many failures in social networking turned into an advantage. The team started by trying to figure out what they learned from the failures of Buzz, Orkut and Wave. Then, they listened to users talk about what they liked and didn’t like about current social services.

Horowitz believes the dizzying array of social products from Facebook to Twitter to Flickr to LinkedIn have befuddled the average user. “What we found was that sharing was fundamentally broken on the Net. It’s not that there weren’t a million ways to share; it’s that there were a million ways to share. They weren’t coherent.”

Google internal data shows that users are two to three times more likely to share content within one of their circles than to make a general post. But Google+ is far from a finished product. Among the more glaring absences is the lack of ads. Nor does it have the massive list of games and other apps built by independent developers and outside companies like Zynga that run on the Facebook platform. There has been criticism that Google+ is too male-centric, although Gundotra and Horowitz dispute that, saying women in particular are doing more sharing in private circles rather than public posts.

Google won’t disclose current numbers, although estimates of 10 million users “sound very stale to me,” said Horowitz.

“We did not anticipate this much this soon, in terms of traffic and passion of users,” Horowitz said. “We thought we had the due course of time to get it right before the world came to our doorstep. The world is at our door, and they want it, and they want it now.”