In Defense of Google+

by David Edelman

I’ve seen one too many “the death of Google+” articles this week. The common theme is a belief that Google+ has failed because it is not quickly growing into a Facebook clone. In many ways it’s silly to compare a 7-year-old social network with 800 million users to a 4-month-old project, especially because Facebook and Google have very different goals in social.

Let’s stretch our brains and think a little laterally about how Google+ may grow into a unique but powerful social service. (We’ll ignore the extra $30 billion per year that Google has to spend over Facebook for now.)

Bringing Social to Great Applications

Google calls Google+ a social layer on its existing services. In the commentary, people tend to gloss over this and focus on how Google fares as a stand-alone social network. This is a mistake. I, for example, use Google+ every day now. But if you look at my feed, you’d think I barely used at all. How is this possible?

Google+ is the social glue that ties together an impressive suite of Google applications. We are just in the very early moments of that integration, but you can see the direction that they’re heading. Let’s take a quick peek.

  • Google Photos. Google is rebranding it’s excellent photo application, Picasa, into Google Photos. The ability to easily import photos, clean them up, use facial recognition to tag the participants, and then seamless upload it and share securely with Circles is amazing. For those of us that aren’t comfortable storing sharing our entire photo collections with “friends” on Facebook, this is a breath of fresh air. Why don’t more people use Picasa today? Very few people know how much is possible. That will change when Google puts it’s marketing muscle around photo sharing. Added bonus: you can get 80 gigs of Google Storage for only $25 a year and backup every photo you’ll ever take.
  • Gmail & Groups. Email was the first big social service, and no one does it better than Gmail. Google+ will ultimately provide an easy way to collaborate with groups of people (more on this below). Imagine easily conversing with your Circles inside of your email application. You could instantly create temporary discussion groups around topics like planning a holiday party. Do your typical emailing plus share photos, web pages and documents. Add in a quick video conference on Google Hangouts to nail down the details and you’ve done sophisticated and effortless planning without leaving your inbox. You could possibly do this on Facebook, but will you people really abandon their inboxes for Facebook as the nucleus of their communications?
  • Google Search and Search Ads. If I can see what sites, products and services my trusted network recommends, then I can make better buying decisions. This isn’t a big reason to use Google+ today, but in five years it will be much easier for me to sort through the clutter and find the good stuff with the help of my social circles.
This doesn’t even touch on the benefits of integrating YouTube (better video recommendations), Google Places (where do your friends hang out), Google Books (what are my friends reading), Google Music (what are my friends listening to), etc. But these are “nice to have” things in my mind. Google+’s key strength will be in improving productivity around it’s core offering. Once it succeeds there, it can worm its way into the rest of our lives.

The Next Big Features

For this stuff to take off, Google+ will need two key types of  features.

  • Circle Creation Tools. Setting up circles is easier on Google+ than Facebook, but still not effortless. Imagine if you could subscribe to someone else’s circle. For example, a teacher at school can create a group of all of the parents in the class. The trade association can provide a circle for you to use.  These shared circles would allow one or more people to organize a group that the rest could use for easy communications. Suddenly, you don’t need to trudge through your contact list to figure out who you’re leaving off. It’s just magically available. For our own circles, Google can mine our communications and use algorithms to help us sort our friends into logical groupings. Suddenly, sharing securely has gotten a lot easier.
  • Service Integration. Much of the magic doesn’t require new inventions. It’s just a matter of bringing together our inbox, our groups, our photo sharing library, and our voice/video communication tools into one interface. This is an area where Google, with its extensive experience with Google Apps, excels. Facebook, with it’s focus on social and simplicity, may find it harder to help us organize around project planning and more work-style tasks.

Five Year Prediction

We will look back at these “death of Google+” articles and marvel at how blind so many pundits were to its obvious potential.

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Interviewed by Chris Snider

by David Edelman

I was Chris Snider’s guest for the 99th episode of his Just Talking podcast. We talk about crashing into BMWs, how to build a successful community, and the lessons of I’ve learned over the last 10 years of web technology work. You can give it a listen here.

Thanks for having me on your show, Chris!

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How You Will Get Your Own Personal Android

by David Edelman

Google is in the business of collecting data about you to target ads effectively.

Android is a tool to get into your mobile life and know where you are, what you’re doing, and what you want. They can use this information to target ads.

But they want to know more. As computer interfaces get more advanced, Android will go deeper. What do you see? Is your heart racing? Combine sensory and biological inputs with your search history, travel patterns, and social environment, and the ads get ever more targeted.

In 25 years, the human computer interactions will be in full bloom. Android will be an OS that sits between your mind and the world. It will be your own personal concierge.

And if the trend continues. If we can build computers onto our brains? Or into our DNA?

You will be, in a sense, partly Android. And the ads will be perfectly targeted.

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Note to Self

by David Edelman

Do what’s important.

Don’t let others suck you into projects. Make sure they truly important before committing.

Your time is your most limited asset. Use it wisely.

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The Drive to Explore & Create

by David Edelman

We’re in the process of selecting a pre-school for our daughter. In all likelihood, the school we pick will be her home – unless some unresolvable problem arises. At the top of my criteria: the school will nurture her drive to explore and create.

My drive was smothered in high school. It took three-and-a-half years of Ivy league tuition to get it back. How many people survive school with a confident push to discover and create?

As we look for entrepreneurial spirits to join Diabetes Daily, I’m struck by how few have the spark. We are all born with the creative drive, but something stomps it out.

I am guarding and growing my daughter’s creative spark fiercely.

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Feed Your Brain!

by David Edelman

You’ve probably heard the expression “fail fast” In start-up land, that means it’s better to try 100 things and get 51 right than it is to try three things and get all three right. Startup Land is a place where the purposeful tortoise loses to the savvy hare.

I’m a first time entrepreneur, so I’m especially keen to get the ratio right. Each day, I spend an hour in Google Reader drinking deeply from a carefully curated list of bloggers writing about startups, team-building, financing, law, marketing, branding, technology, and search engine optimization. These leading minds are sharing a lifetime of wisdom with me – for free! – everyday.

Their words have shaped how I approach fundraising, searching for a business model, creating a strong culture, and managing our technology. It’s saved me from a 1,000 mistakes over the past 5 years.

And it can do the same for you.

So my my advice: build your brain feed and drink up. To get started, here’s my list:

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Goodbye, OpenX (Or Why You Should Leave, Too)

by David Edelman

Dear OpenX,

When we crossed paths in 2007, you were everything I wanted: a free, open-source ad serving platform with a strong community. Within hours of meeting, I was serving our first real ad campaign. The future spread out in glorious possibilities. I saw the potential to grow my favorite hobby, building a community and helping people, into a full-time career.

When Google Ad Manager launched in 2008, I’ll admit that I took a peek. But you shared compelling reasons to say no to Google. Control. Independence. Flexibility. I believed then – and I do now – that there is a danger to giving Google complete access to your inventory and pricing data. Sure, they had some fancy reports. But I believed in your vision.

For the next two years, little changed. You did what I needed. In hindsight, there were warnings. I would often give campaigns an artificially early end date to get them to serve all of the ads on time. Sometimes we would under-serve, and I wouldn’t know why. But more or less, everything worked. I watched you launch your hosted platform and OpenX Market. And I was happy for you that you were developing a viable business model.

Then disaster almost struck on April 12. Hackers exploited a security whole and gained access to our system. Unlike other OpenX 2.8.2 users, the hackers did nothing malicious to us. We lost a month of stats, but no malware was served. We were able to undo the damage and upgrade to the latest version, 2.8.5.

The next week was launched two major campaigns and they under-delivered horribly. We triple checked our setup, played around with settings, and then started reading the forums. We were surprised to discover that the Campaign Delivery Engine was completely busted and had been for over six months.  The support forum was packed with months of complaints and zero (zero!) developer responses.

Then the sad truth hit me: you are an ad serving platform that cannot deliver ads! So what could I do but break up with you?

On Monday, I moved to Google DFP. It was frustrating to update our ad codes, setup our campaigns, and leave our historical stats behind. But my relief has been palpable. The ads are going out on time and with the right priority. We can finally properly forecast inventory availability. And for the first time, I can set a campaign to run and not worry about whether it will fail to deliver.

It saddens me to go. But I confess that my anger is stronger. How could you abandon your product without a hint of apology? I, like so many others, believed in you and the free ecosystem that you represented. I only hope that others can see what’s happening and jump ship before it sinks.

Goodbye, OpenX.

Regretfully Yours,
David

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All Work, No Pay?

March 13, 2010

Congratulations to Manny Hernandez as TuDiabetes.org turns three! As one of the best resources in the world for people with diabetes, it deserves a raucous birthday party. To commemorate this anniversary, Manny shared a very familiar three lessons learned. They are: Running a social network is not easy. Running a nonprofit is not easy either. [...]

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Communities: With Freedom Comes Responsibility

March 9, 2010

Community guidelines are important. They give you a framework to make fair and productive decisions about moderating. They help your members understand what behavior is acceptable and promotes positive discourse. But Guidelines are not enough. As Diabetes Daily has grown, there have been more posts that fall within our guidelines but are unproductive. We spent [...]

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Average CTR on Banner Ads

March 4, 2010

For years, I’ve been wondering whether our banner click-through rates on DiabetesDaily.com are low or high. I want to be able to look our advertisers in the eye and say: “Boy, do we have a great deal for you. Check out these numbers and imagine the return on your investment!” We have many ad spots [...]

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