Google+ meets with early success

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If not for Google’s (GOOG) first three flops at social networking, the search giant might never have come up with a viable challenge to Facebook and Twitter.

Google’s fourth and most ambitious attempt at social networking has set Silicon Valley abuzz, with membership soaring past 10 million people in just three weeks. Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, the two executives in charge of Google+, said in an extended interview that they closely studied Google’s previous failures with Orkut, Wave and Buzz to find a better approach. They also found a close-knit team of engineers and designers willing to take a risk.

Google+ ranks as one of the most important product launches in the company’s history as it tries to catch up with the booming success of 750 million-member Facebook and other social sites, and the threat they represent to Google’s advertising business. Google+ is the centerpiece of a companywide master plan to reboot Google for a modern Web that is increasingly about connecting with people as well as information.

Although the numbers for Google+ are impressive, Gundotra and Horowitz said it’s far too soon to declare Google+ a winner. “We’re Google. We can get anybody

to kick the tires of a product,” said Gundotra, the Internet giant’s top social networking executive. “It doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful.”

Sitting in Building 2000 on the Googleplex, where they assembled the team in June 2010 to build Google+, the two executives talked about the leap of faith they made, and the team of engineers and designers that built the network.

“We’ve got some great characters here,” Gundotra said. “Good people who are jelling together as a team. I think that’s a part of the story that has never been told. People don’t get how magical this team is. How we came together in the course of the past year to become friends.

“We’re a heated team, a passionate team, lots of good fights, but it’s a team that is pretty amazing.”

Experts agree it’s too early to call the social network a hit, even though its popularity helped push Google stock up 13 percent last week. Indeed, Facebook added 250 million members in the year Google+ was being designed. “Until it really starts to go mainstream, and I see my cousin in Florida decide to get on it, I just don’t think we can say it’s a success. We’ve got a ways to go,” said Michael Fauscette, an analyst with IDC.

But the stakes have rarely been higher for Google. Social networking failures like Wave and Buzz are “the glaring failure in their history — the thing they had failed to do — which was to bring people into their products,” said Steven Levy, who followed the Google+ team, code named “Emerald Sea,” as he reported his new book, “In the Plex.” “In the heads of all the people at Google, right up to the very top, it became clear that this was something that was essential to Google’s very survival.”

The team

Gundotra, a former Microsoft executive who had already become one of Google’s most public faces because of his fluid speaking style at product launches, was tabbed by co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and former CEO Eric Schmidt to take the reins of the next social effort.

What struck Gundotra 13 months ago was the makeup of the Google team.

“These were all the nutty people,” Gundotra said. “Why in the world would you work on yet another social product at Google? You had to be pretty nutty. You had to be entrepreneurial. You had to be willing to take risks. There was very little reason to have faith that this effort would be more successful than the earlier ones.”

“This wasn’t a project that was a surefire winner, or a nice place to coast,” Horowitz agreed. “This was a project that required passion just to show up every day, and a willingness to sort of tilt at windmills — a startup-level passion.”

The team included Andy Hertzfeld, a 57-year-old engineer who was on the team that designed the Macintosh computer at Apple (AAPL) in the early 1980s. Hertzfeld built some of the initial software for Circles, the Google+ feature where members get to connect with others. A little green bubble floats to the top of the page when a user drops a connection into one of their Circles.

“Andy is a tremendous talent,” Horowitz said. “I think his spirit, his whimsy, his approach shines through.” While the Google team recently added another 1980s Apple veteran, Bill Atkinson, Hertzfeld has said stories that Google built the network by tapping Apple’s design genius are off-target, and that the contributions of “awesome young” team members like Shaun Modi, Jonathan Terleski, and Joseph Smarr were huge.

The team huddled together on a single floor of Building 2000, where they could have discussions and debates and trouble-shoot problems on the way to the restroom or to have lunch, without having to schedule a meeting.

They created team traditions like “Formal Fridays,” in which everyone had to dress with increasing formality each week until launch. “What started out as blazers turned into tuxedos for some people. It was fun to sort of create that cultural tradition,” Horowitz said. “It was also uncomfortable in the sense that the last thing engineers want to do is dress up. So the longer we delayed launch, the worse it was going to get. So it created a good incentive.”

Sharing was broken

Gundotra and Horowitz said Google’s many failures in social networking turned into an advantage. The team started by trying to figure out what they learned from the failures of Buzz, Orkut and Wave. Then, they listened to users talk about what they liked and didn’t like about current social services.

Horowitz believes the dizzying array of social products from Facebook to Twitter to Flickr to LinkedIn have befuddled the average user. “What we found was that sharing was fundamentally broken on the Net. It’s not that there weren’t a million ways to share; it’s that there were a million ways to share. They weren’t coherent.”

Google internal data shows that users are two to three times more likely to share content within one of their Circles than to make a general post. But Google+ is far from a finished product. Among the more glaring absences is the lack of ads. Nor does it have the massive list of games and other apps built by independent developers and outside companies like Zynga that run on the Facebook platform. There has been criticism that Google+ is too male-centric, although Gundotra and Horowitz dispute that, saying women in particular are doing more sharing in private circles rather than public posts.

Google won’t disclose current numbers, although estimates of 10 million users “sound very stale to me,” said Horowitz. Google is struggling to accommodate businesses, as well as an influx of celebrities like Alyssa Milano, William Shatner and 50 Cent.

“We did not anticipate this much this soon, in terms of traffic and passion of users,” Horowitz said. “We thought we had the due course of time to get it right before the world came to our doorstep. The world is at our door, and they want it, and they want it now.”

Contact Mike Swift at 408-271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/swiftstories.

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Exclusive: Inside Anon+, the world’s first anonymous social network

Forget Google+ – the future of social networking shuns identities altogether. We got an exclusive look inside Anon+, the first-ever anonymous social network.

Earlier this week, Google banned pages related to loose-knit hacker group Anonymous from its hot new social network, Google+. Fed up with the apparent censorship, a group of like-minded hackers, programmers and other digital underground activists decided to take the realm of social networking into their own hands by creating the world’s first-ever anonymous social network.

Still in its infancy (version 0.8 alpha, to be exact), the new network is currently called Anon+, but that name will soon change, according to “Higochoa,” a self-professed hacker, Web developer and computer programmer from Galveston, Texas, who is leading a core team of 12 to 15 other developers, plus freelance specialists, to build Anon+. We had a chance to speak with Higochoa via IRC chat, and he gave us the low-down on what the team hopes Anon+ will become.

Contrary to many of the reports about Anon+, the project is not being built by members of Anonymous, said Higochoa during our interview, at least not in an official capacity. The Anon+ dev team does have ties to Anonymous, but they have distanced themselves from the group because they were “getting attacked by those who don’t like Anonymous,” said Higochoa. The Anon+ crew also wanted to differentiate themselves from certain negative connotations associated with the notorious hactivist collective.

“We just didn’t want everyone to think we are a bunch of hackers sitting around trying to change the world,” he said. “We are actually going to do it.”

The guiding principal behind Anon+ is to give “the people what most corporations have taken away, and that is control,” said Higochoa. “[Anon+] will allow people to get both educated freely, and allow them to voice their opinion without having fear of any org or gov.”

Like traditional social networks, Anon+ will allow users to create profiles, add friends and communicate with one another. Higochoa says that users will have total control over their “circles” of friends (though it’s unlikely they will use the word “circles” officially, as Google+ has already co-opted that word). Like Facebook, only people in a user’s circles will be able to view their posts and other activities on the network.

Higochoa says it’s likely that Anon+ will attract a lot of hackers and Anonymous members “because of the tech and what it provides,” but stipulates that the service is intended for a “wide audience” — anyone will be able to join.

One major difference from traditional social networks, of course, is that Anon+ will be entirely anonymous; members won’t use their real names, a practice that is forbidden on both Facebook and Google+ for legal reasons.

“It is also secure and without a central server, so it can’t be stopped once it’s started,” says Higochoa. This ensures “that control stays in the hands of the people. That alone is pretty different from other social networks.”

The lack of a central server means that Anon+ users will have to download an application to use the network, which will be at least partially based on peer-to-peer technology. This type of system will serve as a key security mechanism for the network.

Anon+ will also differ from traditional social networks — and even other anonymous forums, like 4Chan.org — because users will have greater control over the discussions around their posts to the network, says Higochoa. Things like comment deletion are on the table, as well as the ability to have “parallel” conversation threads on the same topic. This will enable users to “go off on a tangent with one guy while continuing the conversation with another, without worrying about someone else interfering,” he says.

The goal of Anon+, says Higochoa, is to give a user “the tools to get his voice heard over the masses.” Higochoa refused to go into detail about what exactly those tools would be, but he says that the structure and built-in functionality of Anon+ will make such empowerment possible — users will have “the same tools as the big guys.”

In addition to enabling online activism, Higochoa says the team plans to build Anon+ in a way that will let users to more easily organize offline protests, without the risk of the corporate censorship Anonymous and other dissident political groups have experienced on other networks.

Anon+ will likely include “Skype-like” video chat functionality, and other real-time communication features, says Higochoa. The network will also incorporate ways for users to anonymously transfer money between each other, though Higochoa said that system is far from complete, and he could not say whether it would be based upon traditional currency (like dollars), or something more like Bitcoin.

In addition, Higochoa says the Anon+ crew hopes to create a sort of online university, that will incorporate “interactive teaching,” and give teachers the ability “to reach students 24/7, on any subject,” he says.

When asked whether Anon+ users would be setting themselves up to be targeted by law-enforcement agents — just yesterday, 16 members of Anonymous were arrested in the United States — Higochoa says that accounts will be essentially un-hackable, making it impossible for authorities to reveal a user’s true identity.

“[Your] circle of friends will not only be the only ones that see your posts, but the only ones who ever handle any of your data, so there isn’t one place to get hacked,” says Higochoa. “If you get your Anon+ account hacked, it was you or one of your friends.”

Obviously, the team still has a lot of work to do before Anon+ will be ready to start taking on users. Higochoa says the official release will be “sooner rather than later,” but couldn’t give an exact launch date. Of course, the entire project could fall through the cracks at any moment — building a social network from scratch isn’t easy. And besides, the Anon+ team has enough enemies to keep them on their toes.

There are “people who wanna stop us,” says Higochoa. “As long as they are there, we are going to have problems. But other than that, there are none.”

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