Comments on: Google's antisocial downside

When it comes to the online social-networking party, the search giant is playing the wallflower. Is that a wise move?

[baswwe]

i orkut

I orkut everyday!

[caxq]

PORTUGUESE

It is not portugese is PORTUGUESE. Damm it.
It is amazing how u americans like to underestimate everyone is not american. "Orkut is popular in countries of portugese language" ********, orkut is famous in Brazil. FULL STOP. Portugal has only 0,45% of users, againsta 67% of brazilians. Yet, google does not make money on it because they do not want it.

[msims]

Tomato-Tomatoe

Lets call the whole thing off.

[lingsun]

Get a grip, nobody used spellchecker

Get a grip, nobody used spellchecker. And keep your anti-American prejudices to yourself. South Americans should start producing something useful besides banana republics, political corruption, and drugs.

[i_made_this]

GOOG is smart to avoid...

...putting much effort into creating a big & popular global social networking site. As that firm has witnessed since the time of their purchase of ORKUT, the legal liability exposure vis mature content makes it an inane investment for them to fund with anything more than tipping money. The ad revenues war discussed in the article is not over Social Networking Search Utilisation. The war is over becoming your toolbar of choice ~ just ask any exec at Google, Microsoft or Yahoo.

[Bob_Barker]

Google is right to avoid it.

First of all, MySpace is built on top of some of the sloppiest, slow and broken code I've ever encountered.

Second, this social networking thing is a fad. My 2 cents anyway.

[DavidNotik]

Google IS into social networking -- the Google way

Google is in fact highly vested in social networking, but they're going to do it right. They recently made a big push into this with their Google Co-op initiative. See my post on the subject for more: http://dave.notik.com/node/21.

[waynehapp]

Repeat after me.

We are borg...

[rapa1]

Surprised At Google

The main advantage for Google in social networking is that special interest groups who identify websites that are highly relevant add another layer of value to a Google search. I?m surprised they haven?t pushed social networking harder and tried to integrate it into their search analysis.

[Hep Cat]

Orkut's Failure

"Orkut hasn't grown significantly in the United States compared
with the speedy trajectory of other social networks like
MySpace."

That's because for all the blah-blah egalitarianism, anything that
starts from the top in Silicon Valley is almost doomed to failure
from the start.

Jobs as it almost right - he shouts down employees he doesn't
agree with, but he knows their names. Eric, What's his name, and
the other what's his name at Google couldn't care less what the
underlings say or what their names are. This is the culture that
leads to Orkut's failure.

Protest they might, but experience is more right than all the
sling-equipped 767s in the world.

[waynehapp]

A classic strategy

Google has enough money to follow a classic strategy. Through
everything against the wall and see what sticks. :-)

[waynehapp]

A classic strategy

Google has enough money to follow a classic strategy. Through
everything against the wall and see what sticks. :-)

[larrymadill]

A month ago...

MySpace was a fading flash in the pan being dogged by a pre-election Congressional witch-hunt and the general refusal of the company to make any siginifcant improvements to its site; outside of selling more ads. Now someone wants Google to turn into MySpace.

HUH? That's the worst idea ever. Well, maybe a bit of an overstatement, considering the long history of the internet....

Social Networking sites are on par with chat rooms in the fact that they are HOT now and in ten years they will be a dusty relic taken over by something else. MySpace is selling all flash, no pan.

People will always need to search the web and will always want cheap, web-based applications to do...Whatever clever little thing that needs to be done.

Google is smart in focusing on the basics of their business. They are also smart not trying to chase MySpace up the tree of doom too.

Hey, anyone remember FRIENDSTER? Thought not.

[dem0]

Google is on it's own path

There's a reason why Google does things the way it does and so far everything they put their focus on turns to gold. If they had put more money into Blogger, it could have been the MySpace we see now...but they didn't and I'm sure it was for a good reason. It's easy to look at a multi-billion dollar company and try to nit pick what they appear to be doing wrong, but they are a multi-billion dollar company for a reason.

MySpace is much like what AOL and many of the services before the Big Pop that were so popular and made money back then. The problem with services like MySpace is they are stuck as they are. They can add flare here and there and make it "cooler", but they didn't leave themselves a lot of room to actually upgrade their services.

Google tends to choose an area to focus on that they can continue to innovate, revolutionize, and eventually reinvent. Their mission statement is about information and what they deal with the best. The means to create and display information will always be changing, but there will always need to be a place to put it, keep track of it, and give people an easy way to find it.

If you want to look at an example of a successful company looking in too many of the wrong places, look at Microsoft and think how great Windows and Office could have been with all that extra focus. Cool new things will always be popping up here and there, but "cool" is relative. I'd rather put my money in innovation.

[dem0]

The grass isn't always greener

There's a reason why Google does things the way it does and so far everything they put their focus on turns to gold. If they had put more money into Blogger, it could have been the MySpace we see now...but they didn't and I'm sure it was for a good reason. It's easy to look at a multi-billion dollar company and try to nit pick what they appear to be doing wrong, but they are a multi-billion dollar company for a reason.

MySpace is much like what AOL and many of the services before the Big Pop that were so popular and made money back then. The problem with services like MySpace is they are stuck as they are. They can add flare here and there and make it "cooler", but they didn't leave themselves a lot of room to actually upgrade their services.

Google tends to choose an area to focus on that they can continue to innovate, revolutionize, and eventually reinvent. Their mission statement is about information and what they deal with the best. The means to create and display information will always be changing, but there will always need to be a place to put it, keep track of it, and give people an easy way to find it.

If you want to look at an example of a successful company looking in too many of the wrong places, look at Microsoft and think how great Windows and Office could have been with all that extra focus. There are kids using MySpace that were in K-3 when Windows XP was released... Cool new things will always be popping up here and there, but "cool" is relative.