Okay so it’s not as mass market as the Like button is, but Google’s attempt to embrace social interactions is a better start than people are giving them credit for.
I agree with Louis, this is a hint at a future rather than a capability they are ready to lead with today.
Google can use this to amass very quickly a significant amount of affiliation data which then can be used to prime the pump for their own developers as well as third parties who have aspirations for how to use it. Google seems to have learned from past failures, instead of throwing the long ball they are embracing accepted conventions and creating conditions that support future development.
I could jump on the bandwagon critique their effort as thinking small, very me-too, and destined for failure in the absence of a compelling social strategy… but I’m going to give them a little latitude and watch what comes of the +1 data they will accumulate.
Lastly, the branding of +1 is both smart and stupid at the same time, smart because it’s catchy and already has achieved verb status in certain circles, but it’s stupid because it’s very geeky which makes it less approachable for the mass market. This is the one aspect of their launch I really don’t like, I would expect a company like Google to be able to come up with something a lot better than this.
[Cross-posted at Venture Chronicles]
In the same vein:
About Jeff Nolan
My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant.
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About Venture Chronicles
About Venture Chronicles
My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant.
Along the way to becoming a bona fide blogger I started to understand the implications of user generated content. At the time I was a venture capitalist for SAP, the enterprise software company, and in my travels in the enterprise software market it became evident that blogging would be a powerful communication channel for enterprises to use, what we now call social media, and a powerful information collection mechanism for bottom up corporate intelligence. Combined with search technology, social networking software, and wikis, I was witnessing the inception of an entirely new generation of knowledge management software.
I am currently the VP Product Marketing for Get Satisfaction, the simple and effective way to build online communities that enable productive conversations between companies and their customers. Over 50,000 companies use Get Satisfaction to create a social support experience, build better products, realize SEO benefits, and take advantage of brand loyalty behaviors that results in strong word of mouth marketing experiences in the market.
I can be reached at jnolan-at-gmail-dot-com.
