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Guy Kawasaki: Google+ Is The Mac Of Social Networks: Page 3 of 4

Kawasaki: If you went from Twitter to Google+, it is like going from the Apple II or MS-DOS to the Macintosh.

I mean, 140 characters, no inline pictures. How do you follow a thread if you posted something and someone posted back to you? On Twitter, you have to search for @mentions. I have close to 1 million followers. Searching for @mentions of @guykawasaki brings back a lot of crap because people are retweeting me. So trying to maintain a threaded conversation is almost impossible.

By contrast, on Google+, if I post a link or post a message, the [message] threading is within that, so it's much easier to follow.

Carr: We keep seeing articles saying Google+ is a ghost town, that it's stalled, failed--nobody is talking about it anymore. But you're still talking about it.

Kawasaki: I would disagree nobody is talking about it. I think a lot of people are talking about it. It's coming back.

In ... let's say 1987, '88, '89, you could say nobody is talking about Macintosh. It's kind of stalled out, whatever. This is deja vu for me.

Carr: You also talk about the idea that it's not always self-evident, at least not to everybody, what the superior product is. We have this notion that this is the Web 2.0 era where everything flows naturally and everyone should intuitively understand your product.

Kawasaki (laughing): Yeah. Uh-huh.

Carr: Is that a fantasy?

Kawasaki: It's a fantasy, and I think it will continue to be a fantasy.

Carr: Well, how has Facebook gotten to be Facebook? Was it on the basis of people writing books about how to use Facebook?

Kawasaki: It was in the right place at the right time--and what else would you use, at the time? It became sort of this upward spiral. If your classmate in high school used Facebook, and you wanted to stay in touch and be cool, you had to use Facebook.

Drawing the same parallel, if your buddy used MS-DOS and your company wanted to be compatible, you used MS-DOS. We still have a QWERTY keyboard today; there are better designs for keyboards. It's one of those things. Standards get established, but they're not necessarily optimal. Having said that, you know, MySpace was a standard and five years ago we were all saying MySpace was going to control the world, and MySpace would be the operating system of the Internet. I guess we were wrong.

Carr: Were you ever a MySpace fan?

Kawasaki: Uh, no.

Carr: There's another theory that Google doesn't really care about Google+ per se succeeding as a social network. The secret plan is that Google+ is designed to pump human input into Google search algorithms. As long as they have enough people using it for that purpose, that's all they care about.

Kawasaki: I'll answer that this way: Let's suppose that that's true. So what? Let's suppose it's not true. So what?

Either it's an interesting place for your social interaction, or it's not. If you want to have this conspiracy theory, God bless you. I just don't understand why it matters. You either like it, or you don't.

Carr: What was your process for writing this book? Did you just sit down and write, or were you bouncing ideas off of people?

Kawasaki: I bounced a lot of ideas off a lot of people. I would say it took me two to three months to write this book, and about a hundred people tested it for me. This was an interesting experiment in crowdsourcing because I posted the entire Word document and let people hammer on it. The typos a copy editor would have found--in fact, the copy editor found even more--but what was very useful is I remember about 25 good ideas about how to improve the book came from the crowd. So this was crowdsourced editing.

Carr: What were some of those things?

Kawasaki: Factual corrections, better ways to do things. I don't remember them all; it was so long ago.

Carr: Was writing this book a profitable venture in its own right?

Kawasaki: Depends how you value my time. So far, I have probably made $30,000 or something. I make more than that giving a speech. Purely from a money standpoint, you could say, 'Guy, you could make a speech or you could spend three months working on a book.' But this positions me very well in the social media world.

If Google+ succeeds, trust me I'm going to be screaming from the mountaintop that I said so.

And if Google+ fails, I just won't mention it.

Carr: The book talks about posting the same thing to multiple networks to save time. Do you recommend that?

Kawasaki: Very few social media "experts" would agree with me, but if you have a good post, to a good link, it can be identical to all three services. A good post is a good post. Now, on Facebook and Google+, every post has to have a picture. If you look at my posts on Google+, every one of them has a picture. That's a little different for Twitter.

If I could be in Google+ and post everything else identically [to the other social networks], I think that's the ideal situation. You can kind of do it. But there is a theory--some people say when Facebook sees a post coming in from one of these tools that lets you cross-post, it does not display it as much as if it were posted manually. So they're trying to punish you for cross posting.

I don't know if that's true or not. But if it is, that is a factor.

Carr: Are there any features you wish Google+ had that are better on other services?

Kawasaki: I wish there was, for example, a TweetDeck of Google+--a program hardwired and hardcoded for optimizing Google+.