Google & Social: A Cautionary Tale

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Google’s recent acquisition of Wildfire was just the latest in a long series of big moves made by the search giant in their quest for prominence in the social sphere. But it was the first significant one in a while that didn’t involve launching a product uganda whatsapp number database of their own. True, there have been social-oriented acquisitions in the past (Blogger back in the day comes to mind), but lately Google’s most memorable efforts to dabble into the social space came straight out of the labs over in Mountain View and, unfortunately for them, didn’t reach the heights they were undoubtedly hoping for.

Let’s take a look back at some of their efforts and learn some lessons of our own for launching a new product/service.

1. Google Wave: Too Smart for its Own Good?

Back in 2009 when Google VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, and his team first unveiled Google Wave at that year’s I/O conference, people believed they had just witnessed the second coming of email. Combining the latter with instant messaging and layering a boatload of functionality on top of the already impressive combo, Wave promised a radical shift in the way we communicated on the web. Expectations couldn’t have been higher, and everyone and their mother in the tech/geek world (including yours truly) just couldn’t wait to get their golden ticket and grubby hands on the beta (limited to 100,000 users only at first).

Initial feedback ranged from mixed to very positive (check out Engadget‘s and Ars Technica‘s hands-on reviews at the time for instance), with everyone agreeing that this was a tool with a tremendous amount of potential. But analysts also waved a few red flags, cautioning people to keep their expectations grounded as Wave needed to work out some kinks before being officially anointed the future of the Internet, most notably that it lacked a clear purpose and viable real-life applications. Unfortunately, those hurdles proved too great, adoption never took off, even after removing the invite-only gate, and Google pulled the plug on Wave barely a year after introducing it.

But come on, this was pretty cool: