Google's Lost Social Network
Rob Fishman,
BuzzFeed,
Dec 09, 2012
These are two pretty important posts people should read if they're developing online services (and this means pretty much every educational publisher, LMS company, and more, including my own employer). The first is an overview of why Google+ is moribund and why Reader was a far superior product (and community). And if you asked me, you'd find I use Reader a lot more, even though I've written my own RSS aggregator. The second, which is the lynchpin of the first, explains where Google goes wrong - that it doesn't understand services-oriented architecture. It's a great point. Google+ even after all this time is a dead-end island on the web, with no real way to work with other content or services. Case in point: communities. There's no real way to invite people, except through your G+ circles, and even then, unless you've organized your circles just right, you can't invite anyone. I've spent ten years trying to convince my colleague that we should be building platforms and infrastructure, not 'products', and so far, because they can't figure out how to 'sell' a platform, they won't get it.
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