#“Google Places Problem-Riddled vs Facebook Places Doing It Right”
This post has been in my head for a very long time and it'll probably still not get expressed correctly, but here goes. I am convinced that Google is heading in a disastrous direction with their Local efforts and it is bad for businesses, bad for users and bad for Google.
Fanboi
I have been an unapologetic Google fanboi since the day I first entered a search term when they were on the Stanford domain and I immediately stopped using Altavista, Yahoo and Excite forever. I now spend my day on my PC and on my Android phone, using GMail, writing docs/spreadsheets in Google Docs and searching. By and large all of those experiences are superb except for one; Local Search.
Everyone knows how important Local is. Google didn't move Marissa Mayer over to run their efforts for fun, it's the next big landgrab. Most of Google's effort around this have centered on Google Places and in less than a year they have seriously damaged their credibility and gone against their own founding principles.
Web-scale
Google is the ultimate web-scale company. They index the web automatically and they use algorithms to try and show you the best results based on your intent. It's all done by machine without interference. And if they can make a "few bucks" with advertising where the ads are obviously ads, hey go for it. Google broke the old Yahoo/Excite/Blah model of eyeballs. They got you the result you wanted as fast as possible and then sent you on your way just as fast. That is why we have all loved Google for so long. No more goddammed portals shoving crap at us.
All Change
Then in 2010 that all began to change. Algorithms started taking second place to shoving stuff in your face. Here's what you now get if you search for "Hotels in Austin Texas". What is the basis for the order of those results? Places? Reviews? SEO? Ads?
Now click on one of the push pins:
Google Places = Content Farm?
That second screenshot doesn't do justice to the pile of old rubbish on that page. We're been reading about Google struggling with content farms for the past few months. Google Places is the ultimate content farm. A ton of aggregated unfiltered crap dumped on a page to get you to click over to it. Not only that, but there is no "web scale" here. Those aren't the best reviews or the best content they have found about that hotel, it's the stuff the scrape from their business partners with no de-duplication applied so the same content comes from multiple sources due to rampant cross-syndication.
Even worse, click on "book now". A Google partner gets the first link ahead of the business themselves! That's 20% of a businesses margin to Priceline.
As a business you are only allowed to add some basic information about yourself to Places (or buy tag-ads). All of the rest of the crap on that page is controlled by Google and its one-by-one business relationships.
And don't get me started on "please fill out this form if you wish your rich-snippets content to be considered for inclusion in our index". What is this, the Yahoo directory listing in 1995?
So total waste of time for the user and margin-damaging for the business. You, like me, will keep going to TripAdvisor when we just want to randomly search for hotels.
Social Search with Facebook
But of course we no longer want to randomly search, we want social recommendations. Going to Paris for the first time? In 2007 you'd either start with TripAdvisor or you'd Google "hotels in Paris" and spends hours filtering through the noise. In 2010 you did a Facebook status update or a Tweet and asked your friends and followers. You took those recommendations and you then went to the hotels' own sites to check for their own reviews and hopefully their best price guarantee.
In 2011, you use Facebook search (powered by Bing!) and automatically see what hotels in Paris your friends have "Liked" or become Fans of. You then go to the businesses own Facebook Places Page and see what they have to say for themselves. You read about them, see what their fans are saying, see pictures, videos, competitions, you ask questions, you read verified authentic customer reviews (maybe powered by LouderVoice :-) ) and now you can even book directly with the hotel on their new f-Commerce Tab.
Facebook Places works brilliantly for users, brilliantly for businesses and brilliantly for Facebook. Win win win.
Google Hotpot
Or you can take the Google approach where you use Hotpot and say whatever you like about any business, even if you have never been there and that appears on their Google Places Page with no comeback or control. Note my rating of the Driskill Hotel above. I have no idea where it is in Austin.
I actually think Hotpot is a nicely designed app but it has the same basic failing as Latitude, Buzz, etc etc. Google doesn't understand social and doesn't understand people. I have 2000ish followers on Twitter, I have a few hundred friends on Facebook and, 3 months after launch, I have precisely one "friend" on Hotpot. One. Uno. Does a straight line between two points constitute a Social Network? Hell I even have more friends than that on Latitude. Four.
Hotpot has another huge problem, you can't create spots. Recently I had dinner in our local gastropub, The Poacher's Inn. These aren't web-savvy people, they don't even have their own web-site, they use the Good Food one. But they have had a ton of check-ins on Foursquare, they have some on Gowalla and I created their Facebook Places Page that night over dessert, which they can eventually claim for themselves. Google Hotpot? Zip, nada, nothing and no way to change it because Poacher's haven't created their own Places Page.
Google's solution to this? Web-scaling? Crowd-sourcing? Nah! They have salespeople pounding the pavements of Austin trying to get them to create a Places Page and use window stickers with NFC for the 4 people who will have Nexus S phones at SXSW.
Reputational Damage
It's shocking to see Facebook execute perfectly once again with Places and enable the users to build the ecosystem. And it's equally shocking to see the ultimate web-scale company begin letting down their users, businesses and themselves. The reputational damage of pushing low quality Places crap in a desperate desire to remain relevant in a Social world may be fatal over time. Google won Search because it gave better results to the end user. It no longer does that.
Platform + Trust
There are many fundamental differences between Facebook and Google that have been discussed to death. The ones most appropriate to this topic are Platform and Trust. Facebook provides the platform, sets some rules and then trusts businesses, developers and users to build interesting and useful things. Google believes that it knows best and tells you what to do. Command and Control.
Turnaround?
Can Google turn this around? I think and hope they can. If a person can care about a giant company, I think many of us care about Google. And tho it pains me as an Engineer to say it, the primacy of the Engineer in Google must come to an end. Google needs to hire people who understand social and who would fail miserably at silly logic puzzles in interviews. They need to end the 72 step interview process and empower managers to hire people over a cup of coffee. They need people who live and breathe this stuff every day. They need Facebook Fanatics and Twitter Titans with heads full of ideas. And no, I don't mean Social Media consultants following 22,000 people. They need to stop buying and killing start-ups for the Engineering talent and start buying startups for people with ideas who show they can execute. Even if those people can't write a line of code. They need to put those people in a room with some humble but smart engineers who can listen and iterate quickly.
Most of all, Google itself needs to become Social. Looking at Ireland specifically for a moment, how many Google people have we seen at BarCamps in Ireland? Any? Ever? How many tech events have they sponsored here outside of the school coding things which are just recruitment fairs?
Compare that to the Facebook Garages where Facebook supports the tech-community in organising those events. Platform + Trust. Even Zuckerberg was at the one in London last summer! When was the last time you saw a developer get excited about something Google did? Where is the Google Developer ecosystem to match the SEO ecosystem? What does Google do to enable non-advertising-related people to make money? The unstable, unloved AppEngine doesn't cut it I'm afraid.
I'm not sure Skunkworks is the way to go. Whilst that might result in some cool individual products/projects, it doesn't change the company culture. Some of Google biggest failings have been due to their current siloed nature where groups are clearly not talking to each other. The Anti-Social Network. For example, if they had managed to shoehorn Jaiku into the Android addressbook from day 1, this post would probably be irrelevant. My phone addressbook is infinitely more social-focused than my Gmail (I'll be nice and not give Buzz yet another slap).
There is still no sign of Google Me or whatever it is going to be called. I can only hope that the rumours of it being a browser toolbar are nonsense. Fingers crossed.
Phew
Like I said this stuff has been bouncing around in my head for ages. Overly long and rambling I know. Am I totally off the wall with this?