no one wants another facebook - the failure of google+

Google+ is the social network everyone loves to hate. Nick Bilton of the Times brought some equanimity to the discussion and suggested, the most we can assert is that opinions are split. But that won’t help Google build their Facebook-killer, so Bilton aimed to isolate the root-cause of why people feel so ambiguous about it. His answer, design. But that’s not the answer.

Bilton marches an army of possible reasons through his article before narrowing to design. Is it because no one wants another social network? No, there’s Path. Is it because it doesn’t have distribution? No, it’s Google. Everyone’s tried it. Having exhausted the other possibilities, he sees no other failure but design: “the design of Google Plus feels, well, undesigned.” That’s why it’s a failure.

But is that the case? No.

Google+ didn’t fail because of bad design. Google+ failed because they tried to make a slightly better version of Facebook, and no one wants a slightly better version of Facebook.

Path, Instagram, Pinterest – they succeeded because they aren’t Facebook. They didn’t set out to clone Facebook. They set out to find a niche, solve specific problems and make them the centerpiece of their service.

Path provided a more intimate, mobile-only social network alternative to Facebook when Facebook had little reach beyond its website and had begun to feel over-exposed. Instagram introduced retro-filters and reinvented photo-sharing in a mobile setting. Pinterest created a network of things through inspiration boards and the efforts of so many would-be taste-makers who embraced it.

What differentiates Bilton’s counter-examples isn’t design, it’s that they didn’t set out to replicate Facebook. Google did, and that’s the problem.