It’s the utility, stupid

Article first published as It's the Utility Stupid on Technorati.

Google+ is not a ‘product’ apparently.  It’s still a ‘project’.  And it’s out in what looks to be a limited beta release as ‘Field Trial’ – but which feels more like a ‘throttled release’ as new users can then start to pass invites on.  

Google clearly feels that this is all a work in progress. 

However, it doesn’t feel like work in progress. It has hit 10m users in a few short weeks making it one of the fastest growing network launches ever, according to Mashable. The interface is clean and slick – and Circles makes the concept of ‘groups’ easy to implement and manage.  Even the animation when you add a friend or contact to a group is a great little piece of interactive design.

And there are other features not found elsewhere.  ‘Sparks’ looks like it could build into a powerful content recommendation engine, especially once Google+ gains scale.  It also provides a good benefit for users to actually ‘Google +1’ content they find or that their friends may like.  It could also be strong opportunity to monetise the platform as brands looks to promote their own content.

‘Hangout’s are fundamentally video chat (though trying to get that to actually work is a little tricky) – and Facebook’s video chat via Skype looks like it could trump that feature right off the bat.

And I suppose that’s the problem with Google+ so far.  There’s no killer feature.  There’s no compelling reason why this should be my new social network of choice – no reason to give up Facebook.  And I don’t need yet another network in my life.

Even Google’s own FAQs include the question “Why don’t you have killer feature X?”.

So far, I wager that a large proportion of Google+’s growth has been driven by its limited access and exclusivity.  

It’s the power of scarcity. 

Everyone in the digerati wanted an invite and the power to send invites.  How many of Facebook’s News Feed updates were posted from Google+ - just to demonstrate one’s own personal sense of digital status?

But where’s Google+’s utility? Where does it add value to my life that no other platform does? Facebook created that social utility by connecting people with their friends - and it became the dominant social network by doing that better than anyone else.  And it continuously evolved functionality that was useful: from pokes, picture tagging, status updates to Like’s, Fan pages and Facebook plug-ins.

However, Facebook needs to continue being useful.  As Mark Choueke says in Marketing Week, unless it continues to evolve its utility, people will start to drift away from the constant wall of trivial personal updates and stilted brand updates.  (I’m really not sure I can take another brand asking what I am up to for the weekend, each Friday afternoon).

There is some interesting data that shows that although Facebook is growing globally, in some more mature markets Facebook is seeing a decline.  For example in the US (according to Inside Facebook) it lost 6 million users during May this year and in Canada it lost 8% of users (1.52million out of its 16.6m base).  

And this trend is mirrored in the UK. According to Hitwise, Facebook has also seen a declining market share losing ground to both Twitter and YouTube.   

Now, of course, this doesn’t for a second mean that this is even the beginning of the end for Facebook. 

But it does demonstrate the need to keep things fresh and, most importantly, useful.  It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s Skype partnership adds to its utility and how Google+ intends to create some significant space between it and Facebook.