Google+’s Circle Logic

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In 2007, Google appeared to be assembling some key pieces for yet another run at the social networking crown. It acquired Jaiku, a Twitter-like micro-blogging site, and already owned Dodgeball, a service created by the founders of Foursquare that allowed people to share their location with family and friends. Then the recession washed over Silicon Valley, and Google’s leaders decided, as Larry Page likes to say, “to put more wood behind fewer arrows.”

Google’s budding social services were split apart and sprinkled over its major franchises. A feature called Profiles, which allows users to set up pages with their real identity, photo, and interests, was introduced in early 2009 as part of Google search. Around the same time, the idea behind Dodgeball evolved into a service called Latitude and debuted as part of Google Maps. Buzz was introduced in 2010 as part of Gmail and was a disaster heard ’round the world. Users revolted over a poorly conceived feature that exposed their Gmail contacts to the public. The Federal Trade Commission investigated, and big-brained Googlers got widely dinged for cluelessness.

Earlier this year, Google settled with the FTC by agreeing in part to undergo regular privacy audits for the next 20 years. Gundotra and Horowitz both played roles in overseeing Buzz. Google “is a company that embraces the process of learning,” says Horowitz, who joined in 2008 from Yahoo, where he tried (and largely failed) to bring that company into the age of social networking. “We have permission to try bold things that sometimes don’t work.”

Gundotra says Google was simply not yet serious about social networking back when Buzz launched. Then the pendulum swung back toward the idea of creating a single social network. Google streamlined all its social efforts into one project, dubbed Emerald Sea, and put Gundotra in charge. He reports directly to Larry Page. “Understanding the significance of getting this right dramatically ramped up only in the last year,” Gundotra says.

Is there really a spot for Google+ in people’s crowded digital lives? With Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, many people already feel over-networked. Then there’s the likelihood that Facebook will simply copy many of Google’s new features. “The obvious thing you can look for is for Facebook to radically restructure their privacy settings around groups,” says Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research . A Facebook spokesman declined to offer an on-the-record comment about Google+.

Google does have some nice advantages. Hundreds of millions of people already have Google user names and passwords, and many of them tote around smartphones using its Android software. They are all prime candidates for Google+. Corporations already do big business with Google, gobbling up its search ads and jockeying for position in search results, and they undoubtedly will flock to the new service to exploit another way to reach customers. Google says it’s not yet ready for companies to join, but Ford Motor did so anyway earlier this month, and had to specify gender (Other). The first person to post on Ford’s page asked for a free car.

Google will have to tread carefully as it leverages its position to boost Google+. Antitrust authorities in the U.S. and Europe are already reviewing whether the company has a monopoly in the search business and unfairly steers users to its own sites at the expense of rivals. Will it push users of Android and the Chrome browser into Google+, or boost a company’s ranking in search results based on their Google+ profile? That’s the kind of “evil” behavior (by Microsoft in the 1990s) that Google’s founders were referring to with its famous motto. “We won’t do anything the user doesn’t agree to,” promises Gundotra. “I don’t think you are going to see us do anything unnatural.”