

Dear Google: You Can’t Threaten People Into Being Social - dstein
http://gigaom.com/2011/04/08/dear-google-you-cant-threaten-people-into-being-social/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=gigaom

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lsc
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?)

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athom
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.

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hallmark
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.

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entangld
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.

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orijing
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...

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kenjackson
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".

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Elepsis
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.

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lmkg
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.

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rmason
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.

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stretchwithme
a change in incentives is not a threat.

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

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jrockway
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.

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mathewi
if you're talking about this presentation by Paul Adams:
[http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-
networ...](http://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2)
\-- I would agree it's a great presentation, but he works at Facebook now :-)

