FMYI | For My Innovation

Forget what you’ve heard about Google+ being a social network. Move past the current limitations and look into the future with me.

But first, let’s recap where it is now. The debut of Google+ has been endlessly debated by the technorati, lampooned, and hasn’t proven it can generate adoption from the mainstream yet.

To be fair, it’s early. There are promising signs. The new look of the Google homepage and the design of Google+ is clean, it’s smart that they’re starting to integrate it with their other services, and in theory I like the Circles feature (although most people never seemed to use Facebook Lists).

So far, I haven’t seen enough evidence that Google+ will capture mainstream social networking converts. MySpace beat Friendster because it attracted music fans and exhibitionists who spread the word. Facebook beat MySpace because it had a cleaner interface and grew exponentially through college students and it felt like a safe place just for existing friends, not to meet new people.

Right now, Google+ is only a place for early adopters to play around. The power of Facebook and Twitter is their simplicity to the majority and G+ will have to be just as easy and also differentiated enough in the value proposition to get them to switch.

But don’t think of Google+ as a social network. The real promise is if it can achieve the challenging balance between ease of use for the mainstream and a wide range of functionality that touches their lives everyday. A home focused around all the information you care about, with a social layer weaving it together. Think of it as the web-based operating system for your daily life. A more cohesive and elegant version of Windows, and a more community-oriented, interactive, and connected version of Mac OS X.

You’ll be able to move from playing music, to reading a book, checking emails, writing some documents, doing research, looking up maps, shopping, checking sports scores, and more all through a seamless interface with recommendations and feedback from your social connections throughout the experience. Instead of separate solitary experiences, everything will be integrated with your community embedded around the interactions with your content and content you share.

To achieve this dream, Google has a massive challenge ahead itself to integrate all their services which currently seem more disjointed, and will have to embark on an organizational development redesign to empower its employee teams to work together like never before. The confusing days of Chrome OS vs. Android OS vs Chrome browser vs Android browser and endless streams of pet projects have to end to achieve this lofty goal.

To succeed, they’ll need to adopt Apple’s internal operational discipline while keeping Google’s strong relationship with the communities they serve and taking their “Don’t be evil“ mantra to the next level to win this battle.

Google+ looks much better thanks to the touch of Andy Hertzfeld who worked on the original Mac. But from an operational standpoint, will Google learn from the failures of Google Buzz and Wave to gain mainstream adoption and deep integration with other Google services?

I’m looking forward to seeing the results of this epic battle as Google seeks to reinvent its offerings and its internal organization in the face of competition from Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. Meanwhile, we’ll continue to evolve our social collaboration platform for the working world here at FMYI.

Who’s ready for an integrated social UI across Google’s services and the first social operating system?

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-Justin