Really? Please enlighten me, what is Google+ (or Facebook for that matter) about if it isn't about advertising?
Because as far as I know, every service that isn't about being so great people would pay for it is about advertising and nothing else.
Because as far as I know, every service that isn't about being so great people would pay for it is about advertising and nothing else.
Erick Schmidt once said something like "we only want facebook to open their data so people can search for it, failing that, we'll find other ways to get it". It was clear from that day, that they were building a facebook competitor. Not because they were looking for new ways to spam people with ads (that's an overly simplistic generalization). But because they found it important to keep their existing business relevant. Independent of which monetization they were using. Even if google search was a paid premium, they would need social anyway. It's clearly not "about the ads".
I think you are wrong. I don't think Google "spam[s] people with ads". I found myself and most friends to like Google because they have been exact opposite what was before, such as Altavista: one huge Las Vegas Board, where you were forced to see ads totally irrelevant (spam).
Most GOOG revenue comes from the front page search engine. You search for something. Therefore, you ask to be "spammed".
Social signals are less valuable than search terms. Search terms very often lead to a direct purchase. Social is just another avenue, like TV, to build brand awareness. It's very valuable, but it's not search-valuable.
The competition was already doing this, Google was threatened. Bing had a deal with Facebook. Users were already using Facebook to look for information instead of Google. They tried to outsource social to facebook and twitter. That proved an unideal strategy. Social was too important for their business to rely on the good will of another company. Social is the future of search. Google saw this coming a mile away and got into social before they could become irrelevant.
Social is the future of search, this fact is independent of advertising. Even if Google had a different business model for their search engine. They would still need social. They didn't get into social because of ads, they did because search needs it.
Says who? The fact is that arguably the most hardcore googlers are here on HN, and I would imagine that most of us don't care for, and even dislike, social search.
That's not enough to prove that social isn't the future of search, but it's enough to think twice about it.
It's about your identity.
Google has said outright that their plan is to become an identity company. Google already knows everyone's identity (or have at least put extraordinary amounts of effort into probabilistic matching it). They're not going to stand by and let Facebook and Twitter own the login authentication process the same way Google currently owns the website analytics process.
Any user can create a context-specific throwaway identity on the net, and Gmail used to be an easy way to do that. But the identity that's very difficult to throw away is the one you've built connections with in a social network.
This is why they're hell-bent on pushing G+, banning pseudonyms, requiring mobile phone numbers, and merging user tracking data across all of their properties.
Google went from a technology company (with the goal of collecting and making available all the world's information) to a social media company (with the goal of collecting information on the unwashed masses). Google has gone from cool to dirty and I think we'll see more Googlers leaving the company as they slowly discover that fact.
Like the early days of the web, everybody can see that it will be very important going forward, but the business models it will support aren't fully clear yet. So it's a mad land grab at the moment in the hope it will monetize or be commercially leveragable somehow down the road.
For example, a Facebook valuation of $100B? More than $100 per active user? Come on. No matter how well you can target them, how many banner ads are these people going to click?
Facebook wasn't created for advertising so much as advertising was the logical way to profit from having that many people use your product.
Google certainly is motivated to compete with Facebook for that advertising revenue but their real motivation is just the user base which I'm sure they already have they just haven't been able to convert them to social users.
How many users do you think Google has? I'm not talking about Google+, I'm talking about Google products, in general, including search.
That's a rather bold claim. How many of those users see, much less click on those ads? I know for all my family (of which roughly half use FB), no one sees ads because I've disabled them. How many of those 750M are active accounts that represent real people?
Fact is, we don't know and it's their revenue that shows us... and they're far far behind Google in that respect.