I have mixed feeling about this.... yet another attempt by Google to get social.
I read an article somewhere else that the reason Google doesn't get social is because of its "geek" culture (no offense to fellow geeks, I'm just quoting the original article). Because Google is so technology focused, it sometimes loses its grip on human interaction.
I can't say I'm totally agreeing with that article but it does make some sense. Wave for example, technologically excellent and revolutionary, but really hard to use for a non-tech person.
I am not sure about that. Though I do think there is a certain feeling of elitism within Google, like all the brightest people are inside (which to be honest it's probably a pretty good assessment). So I am not sure how much they can get the very real but very (intellectually) shallow world of social networks.
Googlers seem to love to tackle hard problems (e.g. Wave and Instant search) but social networks are not a hard problem from an engineer point of view.
"Googlers seem to love to tackle hard problems (e.g. Wave and Instant search) but social networks are not a hard problem from an engineer point of view."
So the mentality goes: there's no motivation to come up with the next best social network, unless it can also simultaneously calculate the interconnectedness of every human being on this planet...
I read an article somewhere else that the reason Google doesn't get social is because of its "geek" culture (no offense to fellow geeks, I'm just quoting the original article). Because Google is so technology focused, it sometimes loses its grip on human interaction.
I can't say I'm totally agreeing with that article but it does make some sense. Wave for example, technologically excellent and revolutionary, but really hard to use for a non-tech person.