Patrick asked me two questions today.

The first: “can Google+ succeed?” The answer is no. Google can gain plenty of eyes and get those faux “engagement” numbers from people incidentally, mindlessly clicking the red notification box in their email but without a hook, there’s no reason for a beat.

People are selective about their social networks. The ones they choose or don’t choose to join says something about them as an individual. I’ve met quite a people on Facebook and Instagram but not on Twitter. Plenty of Facebookers + Pinterests without Twitter. Just as many people on Instagram and Twitter but never touch Facebook. And so on. They chose their combinations based on how each platform enhances their life either by exposing their own creativity or facilitating the discovery of a particular flavor of content. Forcing everyone onto Google+ and expecting them to just go for it, go nuts, go *social* can’t work.

Google+ is a platform without personality - no sense of those integral early adopters who define the pathos of the site. Think of how Tumblr evolved, they’re one of the strongest examples out there of early adopters creating a vibrant culture. From a very close-knit circle of mostly tech kids and expanding outwards, one meme at a time. Where else can I shamelessly post Sailor Moon pictures? I never would put them on my Facebook.

Beyond that, I believe Google+ has already failed. I follow several people who worked on the Google+ team (found and followed thanks to this article) and some haven’t posted in days. If even the people who created the product aren’t using it, there’s no hope.

Could Google+ have succeeded under different circumstances? Sure. By not being a Google product. By experiencing organic, natural growth instead of being shoved into our email app. By having passionate founders working on a unique problem instead of a team of employees in a large corporation trying to force a product which encompasses the major features of every other existing social platform. By standing out. I’m saying they should’ve bought social.

The second question from PMo: “are Google goggles going to be a thing?” Fucking yes. Of course. Get me one step closer to a life like Uma Thurman’s in Gattaca, please. 

One side of me at first thought: no one is going to wear Google goggles. Does anyone use the clap on? What about bluetooth headsets? [ok some people do wear those] How about segways? Tech can make our lives simpler in magnificent ways but if it makes you look dorky, it’s out. 

However, then I thought about how people take pictures of their food. It’s so annoying and obvious and makes everyone around roll their eyes. Why are you all taking photos of your food?! Eat, you dopes. But I do it too, every single stupid brunch. This habit acquired by the smug satisfaction of attention via Instagram hearts and tweets. If Google goggles can somehow overcome their social handicap and create a positive reinforcement greater than the IRL embarrassment of wearing the things, they’ll be everywhere.

Why don’t products innovate on friends?

Immediately after posting my post on how Instagram could have beat Facebook, my friend Jason sent me a gchat pointing out that with scale and time, Instagram would eventually face the same problems Facebook does - random posts clogging, etc. Which made me think about “friends” in general. Why is this the one feature products don’t iterate?

There are two types of “friends” in social, either a mutual friending or following. I’m a fan of following, the one way system makes it easier to control the content you see - the problem with mutual friending is that most won’t deny a friend request from an acquaintance for fear of seeming rude, leading to plenty of posts which one doesn’t care about in their feed. But even the following system leads to a lot of slough in the feed.

Unless if you’re diligent, you’ve probably randomly followed too many people. Currently I follow 994 people. I do not care about 994 people! I don’t know 994 people! Most of those 994 people are irrelevant to my life and were instances of either 1) expectations that eventually the follow would come in handy via good article sharing or networking or 2) expectations that the individual would be a bigger part of my life than they turned out to be [hi ex boyfriend’s best friend in my feed!]. And guess what? I’m never going to spend the time to go through all 994 and choose who to unfollow. So it’s just going to get worse.

Both systems fail with time and scale because we’re human and we mess up. We get drunk and follow some blogger who wrote an article we liked or that nice girl who always at replies us. This needs to change. However unnatural it might feel to mess with a user’s friend list, it’s the best thing for the product. Good product designers innovate based on users’ actions but great product designers anticipate the unexpressed desires of their users. 

I say, use it or lose it. What if products like Twitter pruned the hedges for me? Implementing a feature that automatically unfollowed people who I haven’t retweeted, at replied, or favorited in the last three or six months. If I haven’t cared about what they’ve had to say in that much time, I’m probably never going to care. Social wars could be won or at least seriously jolted by a product which figures out an innovation on friends.

The idea of “use it or lose it” could be most powerful because it might raise the bar for content. Not only are you trying to get followers but now you’re also trying to retain them. The converse is true, however. People might spam feeds looking for reactions and reacting to other’s contents in order to keep followers. But the beauty of it is that like a bratty child, with “use it or lose it” you can just ignore the spammers and eventually, they’ll stop.

Instagram could have beat Facebook.

Here’s why.

Reflected in the ubiquity of Apple devices, people value design above anything else. Due to the product’s exaltation of design, Instagram is less geared for overshare than Facebook, relieving the eye rolling which occurs when popping open Facebook’s news feed. Users are so uninterested and annoyed by what their “friends” are saying and posting that Facebook has to allow users to “remove” particular friend’s posts from the news feed.

Take one photo. One. Make it look good, really good. Place it into all your followers’ feeds, if you’re too boring they can unfollow you like practically everywhere else social now on the web. Instead of an accompanying bolded status, the caption on the photo appears just like a comment would. Unobtrusive. Picture is the focal point. Hearts are an easy thing to give away. The elimination of retweets or creating a hierarchy from the number of hearts on a post creates a sense of surprise in the feed with the broadness of importance - as you scroll the pictures range from cappuccino, puppy, engagement ring!, shot of sky, newborn baby!, cute girl close up!, french fries, frothy beer, grass. It keeps the user engaged enough to scroll their the whole feed, whereas I rarely - if ever - bother even scrolling downward in my Facebook news feed. 

How could they have expanded? First, clean up the Popular tab. Every time I click into it - it’s weird sexy girl shots and lame looking beaches with hearts drawn in the sand. Make an educated guess on what would interest me based on my friends and hearts - or just replace it with the “following” tab inside of the Activity section. Then, eliminate the “news” tab in Activity. Place new follower notifications inside one of the subsections in my profile tab. 

Then add status updates, but not like on Twitter. This could be done in a parallel way to how Instagram energizes the user as a photographer, but for words -  look at Findings, the betaworks product. Findings creates a feed of what people you follow are reading, but gives users a beautifully simple bookmarklet with the onus that they carefully select a quote from the piece to frame the article.  Make it about surfacing great quotes - allowing the user to be creative and expressive in what/how they chose to share the article - it hits on Instagram’s ability (some might say magic) to make creatives out of amateurs. The surprise of varied importances is also there - hard, hitting, big *news* news + soft, fluff pieces. 

From there, anything could be possible. I’m going to suppose that they could have redesigned with a shelf-like side-bar similar to Path instead of the tabs across the bottom (and probably still might do this), copying from the Path design would open up the UI greatly to added products. They have to make sure the added features carry with them the magic transformative mix that makes Instagram powerful. 

But could they beat Facebook? Yes. Facebook is to Microsoft what Instagram is to Apple. Instagram might not have the full viral power of tagging photos and placing it into other’s streams like Facebook but my theory is that as time goes on, the overwhelming majority of people are going to value privacy over pervasiveness [this should be a duh point but some may have contention] and the less explicit nature of sharing via Instagram would be more and more cherished. 

Facebook is now a clunky way to express oneself on the web, carrying too many relics from older ages of social on the Internet - mutual friending (though they’ve scrambled to push away from that with the ability to remove a user’s posts in the feed and subscriptions), boring photos (this will change thanks to Instagram), a way of making personal suddenly seem impersonal (do you really care about the birthday of the last person you wished happy birthday to on FB?). Those still using Facebook as their full social presence on the web are akin to those still carrying around Dells and Blackberrys. Don’t you know you could be having so much more fun?

With smart iterations and small changes, Instagram could’ve taken away from Facebook their grip on social. Just like software giants, no social site is too ubiquitous to be overturned.