By Chris Crum
If you follow the social media industry, you probably know who Guy Kawasaki is. Just in case you’re not familiar with him, he used to be the chief evangelist of Apple. He’s the co-founder of Alltop.com and Holy Kaw, and the author of APE, What the Plus!, Enchantment, and nine other books. What the Plus! (Google+ for the Rest of Us) version 2.0 was recently released by McGraw Hill, and after reading the book, we decided to pick Kawasaki’s brain about some of the points he makes in it, and about social media in general.
To listen to Kawasaki talk, you would think Google+ is the best social media experience one can have on the Internet. I’m guessing some of you have a different opinion. Let us know what you think in the comments.
The Steve Jobs Google+ Analogy
In the Book, Kawasaki says that Google brings power to Google+ “roughly equal” to Apple having Steve Jobs as CEO. When we attended BlogWorld last year, we sat in on a discussion between Kawasaki and Chris Brogan, in which he expressed similar sentiments. At that time, he said, “I think Google+ is to Facebook what Mac is to Windows.”
We asked him about the general response he gets from people when he makes such an analogy, whether or not people agree, and if those who are not on Google+ actually believe it.
“I haven’t much response to this comment at all,” he tells us. “I think the analogy is flattering to both parties. To think that one person could equal the force of all of Google. And to think that Google could equal the force of Steve Jobs. No one picked up on the cleverness of my analogy.”
In the afterword of the book, Kawasaki says he wants people to love Google+ as much as he wanted people to love the Macintosh. When asked why he cares so much, he says, “This is because of my Apple DNA: I want people to use the best tool for the job so that they can become more creative and productive. I can’t stand sub-optimization. To this day, when I see someone firing up a black, plastic, thick, ugly laptop, a little piece of me dies.”
Can Google Reach Twitter’s Level For Real Time?
Kawasaki says in the book that “Twitter is for real-time perceptions”. It seems that Google is really lacking access to this kind of info since it lost the Twitter firehose for realtime search results. The company has even indicated in the past that it could bring back the feature with Google+ data (along with data from other sources). So far, it doesn’t seem like Google has done a great job on that front.
We asked Kawasaki if he thinks Google+ can get to where Twitter is for “real-time perceptions”.
“I don’t see it happening soon nor is it clear to me that this is Google’s goal,” he tells us. “The sweet spot of Google+ is posts that are more cogent than ‘My cat rolled over’ or ‘Obama sucks.’ Real-time perceptions and thoughtful composition are inherent opposites. A social-media site can’t be both. If I just wanted to blast out 140-character messages without embedded photos or video, I already know where to go.”
Yet, that’s kind of what I’m getting at. You go to Twitter, and it’s hard for Google to accomplish its mission of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible when it can’t provide real-time updates when they’re at their most relevant. Google risks pushing people away to Twitter.
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