Google+ a Knee-Jerk Reaction to Social Networking?

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Google+ may be the newest kid in the social networking block, and everyone is lauding how quickly it rose to prominence as the must-join social network. But a Google engineer rants about how Google lacks the proper platform for social apps to begin with.

Google+ has good privacy settings, and you can limit sharing of a post to a select circle or select individuals. You can even control whether to let those individuals share and re-share your post. A Google engineer, though, ranting about Google’s social networking efforts, might have forgotten to set his privacy settings, or someone within his network may have shared it for public consumption. Whatever the case, the post is now published for the whole world to see.

Steve Yegge never meant his post to get out to the public, yet the 5,000 word discourse on how Google “doesn’t get platforms” seems to be the hot read right now. Yegge explains how much he learned from working at Amazon for more than six years prior to joining Google, and how Google seems to be developing products without first thinking of the underlying platform.

The article is a lenghty read (you can check out the source link), but here are a few main points.

• Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos revamped the whole Amazon system, such that it was turned into a Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) setup.
• This SOA setup eventually became the underpinnings of Amazon’s cloud services like AWS, EC2, Relational Database and even its own retail website — which are successful in the enterprise market, as well as with small businesses that need cloud computing, content distribution networks, and basically running apps on remote servers.
• Even Microsoft has built products on its own platform, and continues to do so.
• Google+ had no API at launch, and has only one API to date, which simply retrieves users’ post streams.
• Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction to the success that other social networks, like Facebook, are experiencing with running apps. However, establishing the Google+ social network, adding a few features and games, makes it a short-term success without expanding the underlying platform first.

That one last thing that Google doesn’t do well is Platforms. We don’t understand platforms. We don’t “get” platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on.

Yegge says that the golden rule of platforms is to “eat your own dogfood,” which means to “start with a platform, and then use it for everything.” He says that developers cannot just release products and then bolt on a platform as an afterthought. For now, he says Google is “a Product Company through and through,” and cannot just pretend to “turn them into magical beautiful extensible platforms later.”

The post was actually taken down by Yegge after realizing his mistake in posting it for public consumption. But he says he consulted with Google’s internal PR department, and they were supportive of him, not wanting to censor their employees. How will Google react to these rants? Will Google start to rethink its business and start a platform from ground-up? Or is it enough for Google to continue launching “beta” products at a quick pace, and then fine-tuning and refining these along the way?