Lifeboats Away

The impending shutdown of Google+ is proving to be interesting. There has been a lot of trying out new social media sites and reporting back on the pros and cons of each. The founder of one popular alternative, MeWe, has shown up on Google+ "in person," as it were, to make a pitch for his service. To the best of my knowledge, he's the only direct representative of a company to actively recruit new users.

While Google+ going away may seem that it would be a boon to Facebook, it wouldn't be a direct one. People who came to Google+ and stayed throughout the place being called a "ghost town" over and over again (mainly, I suspect, due to a lack of a major presence of popular businesses on the site) are unlikely to want to migrate to Facebook. So it's likely not worth Facebook's time to even detail an intern to look into enticing people to the Zuck side.

But there is a fairly simple way that Facebook can benefit from this event. If:

• The migration becomes fairly chaotic,
• Former Google + user groups to fragment and disintegrate and/or
• Rumors of colonization by spammers and political extremists gain traction,

This will benefit Facebook. Mainly, I suspect, because the "Google failure beat" of the technology media will be watching. The more painful the transition away from Google+ is, the more it buttresses the idea that moving away from Facebook, while maintaining the digital life one spent so much time and energy building, will be difficult and risky. It's Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt that Facebook doesn't have to have their fingerprints on.

If Facebook is the Major Leagues, Google+ was largely considered an abject failure because it was never able to rise above farm-club or college team status. But even if you consider that generous, and would compare Google+ to a high-school team, other social media platforms have avoided the stigma of failure, because even though they're only Little League (or even T-ball), no one expects them to be any better. It's believed that they're always going to be marginal players. I'd never even heard of MeWe prior to the announcement that Google+ would be shuttered - it doesn't even show up in Wikipedia.

Which raises a question of its own. Facebook is not in the social media business. It's in the information business. While it's commonly said that Facebook users are the company's product, it's likely more accurate to say that they're suppliers, wholesalers if you prefer; the information and attention they bring is being sold to other business customers as Facebook's product. This, it seems to me, is part of why Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had so much difficulty answering Senator Lindsey Graham when asked: "Is there an alternative to Facebook in the private sector?" A straight and honest answer would have required admitting to the true customer base. (Of course, another reason could easily be that Mr. Zuckerberg understood that if he claimed another company could actually compete with them, that upset users might immediately switch to the other service.) Alphabet could afford to be in the social media business, they have a ton of money; they didn't need Google+ to be a profit center. In the end, this didn't stop them from under-resourcing Google+, and rather than remedy that, they decided to simply nix the whole enterprise.

Although that leaves aside the question of whether Google+ was genuinely in the social media business, it does raise an important question: Can anyone actually survive with "social media" as their product, rather than as payment for something more valuable? On the face if it, that answer appears to be "no." Social media users expect to be able to access a service without needing to pay money. And if all they're going to bring to the table is attention and information, then social media providers will have to find a way to parley that into a means of keeping the lights on and the servers running.


The lack of a single clear alternative to Facebook (or, perhaps, Google+ being that alternative) already works in Facebook's favor. It might not be a literal monopoly, but it's close enough. The five-year head start that Facebook had over Google turned out, in the end, to be completely insurmountable, even with Facebook making one misstep after another. But I suspect that people will be watching, to see how easy it is for the orphaned Google+ user base to build new digital homes for themselves. If it goes off without a hitch, others could be enticed to make the leap. But if it goes badly, Facebook's boosters will be waiting.