Google+’s Circle Logic

Will the search giant’s easy way to organize one’s life in “circles” allow it to catch archrival Facebook?

Bradley Horowitz (left) and Vic Gundotra: Burned by Buzz, and back for more

By Brad Stone

In the beginning, there was Friendster, which captivated the early Web’ites before it was smitten by slow servers and exiled to the Far East. And then a man called Hoffman begat LinkedIn, saying, “This name shall comfort professionals who want to post their résumés online,” and Wall Street did idolize it. And then Myspace lived for two thousand and five hundred days and worshiped flashy ads and was subsumed by News Corp., which the LORD hath cursed. And Facebook emerged from the land of Harvard and forsook the flashy ads for smaller ones and welcomed vast multitudes of the peoples of the world. And it was good.

Now there’s a new figure in the genesis of online social networking, Google+. Sprung from the loins of the mighty search giant, Google+ is something unusual for Chief Executive Officer Larry Page and his minions: a social network off to a promising start. The service includes a way for Web users to share with limited groups of friends, without requiring that they blast their updates to awkwardly large swaths of distant acquaintances or the entire Web. In the process, Google+ has won the devotion of some of Silicon Valley’s earliest adopters and toughest critics, and may finally allow Google to humanize its utilitarian suite of products and confront its archrival, Facebook. “This could scarcely have gone better,” says Bradley Horowitz, a vice-president of products at Google and one of the key architects of the new site. “These are the first steps of a race we intend to be in for many years.”

Since the company started distributing invitations to Google+ on June 28, 10 million users have signed up and visited at least once. There has been no immediate backlash from users or privacy activists, a minor triumph in its own right, given past controversies over flops like Google Buzz. Even a few celebrities have shown up to the party. Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban posted to Google+ 67 times over a two-week period in July, vs. 29 posts on Twitter and 14 on Facebook. Michael Dell, CEO of Dell, held 22 video chat sessions with users over the last two weeks, using a videoconferencing feature called Hangouts that lets members chat face to face with up to 10 people at a time. Even Mark Zuckerberg himself, along with some 60 other Facebook employees, has opened an account.

The mojo is so good that Page took a quick bow on his quarterly earnings conference call with analysts on July 14. “Google+ is also a great example of another focus of mine: beautiful products that are simple and intuitive to use,” he said.

Google was basically forced to reenter the social pool with a strong service: Social networks, which have stumped Google for much of the past decade, are becoming the gravitational centers of the digital universe. Internet users spend more time now on Facebook than they do on Google, according to ComScore, and Facebook controls a commanding 17.7 percent of the growing market for display ads, vs. 13 percent for Yahoo! and 9.3 percent for Google, according to EMarketer.

Whether Google+ keeps the momentum is another matter. Many analysts do not share the exuberance of Google’s execs and the service’s early evangelists. “What they did is copy the best of Facebook and make it very simple to use,” says Jeremiah Owyang, a social media analyst at the Altimeter Group. “Google stopped trying to be innovative and is just doing what works.” Lou Kerner, a social media analyst at Wedbush Securities, questions whether Google can truly displace Facebook among mainstream Internet users, who were trained by Zuckerberg to use their real names online, post on each other’s walls, and tend to their virtual farms. “Traction in the Valley does not translate into traction with the rest of the world,” Kerner says.