Dear Google: You Can’t Threaten People Into Being Social | Hacker News Reader

Dear Google: You Can’t Threaten People Into Being Social

gigaom.com

33 pointsdstein21 comments

meh, bonuses are hard. Once you start giving them, people like this start saying that you are 'punishing' your people if you don't give them a bonus that is quite as large next year.

I mean, obviously, the idea behind a bonus is that it's something you don't always get; something extra, so that employees can share when the company is doing well, or a extra thank you to employees who worked extra hard or who were especially effective at helping the company.

Of course, trying to get employees who have the same attitude as the author to have the right attitude about bonuses is hard, and I don't really have any good ideas how, other than making bonuses rare, which has it's own problems. Maybe having bonuses not on a set schedule? (e.g. tie the bonuses to, say, breaking a quarterly revenue record, and only give bonuses when that event occurs, rather than every year, once a year?)

This reminds me of a guy at the last place I worked. It wasn't bonuses he was on about (though we had that issue come up, too), but performance appraisal. He was always trying to figure out just how much he needed to do to "far exceed expectations", as though by accomplishing just that much (and no more?) each year, he could "far exceed" consistently.

I think he might have been a little unclear on the concept.

He was unclear, really? It sounds to me as though he fully understands the "don't go all out on your first wedding anniversary" concept.

I think the problem with this program is that it's tied not to the success of the company itself -- which everyone has a stake in -- but the success of social features with which many people at Google probably aren't even involved, and over which they have no control.

Perhaps the idea is that the Google employees will suddenly feel compelled to get all their family and friends to use the social stuff, and they'll in turn bring in their friends, and that will be enough to tip it into mainstream usage

Yes, Larry Page specifically mentioned that in the memo.

Oh, cheers. I just read the article.

I've worked at two companies where the bonuses worked well, and both of them tied their bonuses to events: either getting code past a milestone, or sales of a product reachign a certain level (though this one was a little too delayed from the actual work)

Google profiles need to solve facebook's privacy problem. Do what the competitor's aren't doing. Let us have control over what we share. They disrupted email with with gmail (by offering the storage space people wanted) they should do the same for social.

What do you think Google should do that Facebook doesn't let you do with its privacy settings?

In my opinion, Google is even more open than Facebook about user data...

1. Allow the user to easily separate public from private personas. It could be public Linkedin-type profile to general views and allow informal personal profile like Twitter to exist for personal friendships.

2. It's not really about the settings, it's about feeling secure about your web identity.

By default everything is private -- even my existence in the social network.

And then modes to easily see what is available to different classes of people. E.g., "my friends view", "my public view", etc...

And then when apps say they need a specific class of data, I want a button that will show exactly what will get sent to them today. So when I click this I can see, "Oh, you're getting those pictures!" or "I didn't realize my phone was still in here and being sent over".

They need to advertise that

Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that sounds good in theory but leads to a pretty awful experience in practice.

Here's an example for you: You are a private user on the social network. You post on a friend's wall (or equivalent).

Can that friend's other friends see your post? If not, that's going to make it seem like there's no activity on your network. Can that friend's other friends request to add you as a friend? If not, that's going to prevent people from making new friends. But if they can, then you've confirmed your existence on the network every time you've done anything.

It turns out that if you want to be a private person, you don't get a lot of value out of your social network, and the social network doesn't get a lot of value out of you. Your best option is to not join a network at all--and, indeed, if you target your network to users who mainly want privacy, you'll find that is what will happen.

If you google google circles circles was supposed to do that, and more, by offering you not just a profile, but multiple circles, to help keep your boring dysfunctional professional life from your boring dysfunctional family. It was a 2-3 day story on March 11ish, then denied by google....

I don't quite understand why "social" is a goal in itself. When I look back at Google's underwhelming attempts at getting in on this newfangled social scene, I feel like they were products that were conceived by starting with the word "social" and trying to come up with a product that word describes. They didn't feel like they were made by starting with a want or need (or dissatisfaction with an existing product) and designing a product to satisfy it, which is where most of their successes have been. As long as Google keeps doing social just for the sake of doing social, it will keep being their white whale.

I can't help but compare this to Bill Gates pivot after they launched Windows 95 and he turned the entire company towards the Internet. He didn't need to threaten their bonuses. He lead, this is where we're going and failure wasn't an option. You can quibble about Internet Explorer, IIS and ASP classic all you want but they succeeded in crushing Netscape.

a change in incentives is not a threat.

And employee incentives isn't threatening customers into being social like the title implies.

The only talk that I've ever seen about social networking that made me say, "YES! This guy gets it!" was from Google, so I'm thinking that they can pull it off. It is going to take a lot of engineering effort and testing, though, so it's not something we're going to see tomorrow.

if you're talking about this presentation by Paul Adams: http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-networ... -- I would agree it's a great presentation, but he works at Facebook now :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com