Source: needtagger.com
Google may be about to announce a huge makeover of its
social media plans that include Google+. This is due to the fact that the executive in charge of the project, Vic
Gundotra has left the company. It is
rumoured that Google+ will become more of a platform than a full-blown Facebook
competitor. They may also stop mandating
that all new products contain social integration. This has previously been an issue, and hasn’t
helped Google+’s reputation at all in the past.
Google has responded to many of the rumours, and they said
that the news of Gundotra’s departure doesn’t change the company’s plans. This is slightly blurred as Google could have
been noted of the departure a long time ago, allowing them to change their
strategy in order to answer such rumours, and if so it is a clever tactic by
the social media firm.
If changes to Google+ are coming, people will not be
disappointed at all. The project has
been a bit of a mess from day one with conflicting strategies, and the site has
suffered due to many pointless features that do not add enough creative weight
to the project. Any good features on the
site seemed to be replaced by sub-standard versions, an example of this being
the well-received Latitude app, which was replaced in favour of similar
features in Google+ proper.
Google’s next move is crucial, as the current trend in
social media is to make things simplistic, and taking away clutter. This has led to people using more platforms
to split up their tasks. Facebook
clocked this and made the move to purchase Instagram and WhatsApp. If they cant keep people on their own site
and apps, then at least they have the spending power to own the popular apps
that people use.
Source: gizmodo.com
Whilst Facebook was taking these big risks, Google was still
moving in the direction of creating bloated Google+ features. Again this was not well received, and the
main issue users took was with the Google+ integration in Google Reader and
YouTube, both of which had massive communities already. Google were changing good recipes with
ingredients that didn’t make sense, whilst taking no risks at all in the fight
for social media supremacy.
With all the above considered, it is the right time for
Google to change its approach to Google+. There are signs of this happening already, with Google last week letting
Gmail users share photos that they have automatically backed up from their
phones. This liberates the photos you
have taken, and maybe Google are now taking note of other companies who have
experienced success in the social media world.
Google+ has been under question for a long time so maybe it
is right for the company to start fresh now that the leader of Google+ has
departed. It will be interesting to see
what they pull out of the bag as a firm the size of Google cannot afford to
fail a second time around.
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