A Google engineer was supposed to be ranting to colleagues about Google+, but with a quick click of the mouse made his epic update public on Google's new social network.
The epic rant now only exists on a few sites, such as Silicon Filter, and is really, really long. The highlights, aside from why an engineer shouldn't work at Amazon.com, are these:
Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that’s not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there’s something there for everyone.
Steve Yegge goes on to say that Google+ is "a pathetic afterthought," by Google because the company launched the social network without an application programming interface (API.) "You don’t eat People Food and give your developers Dog Food. Doing that is simply robbing your long-term platform value for short-term successes. Platforms are all about long-term thinking," he wrote.
Is Google+ just a pathetic afterthought? Is it chasing after Facebook rather than innovating? Now knowing that Google didn't do a lot of work behind the scenes, it's beginning to look like the tech titan may not have had a clear strategy in mind. The worst part is that the tech world needs another social network to challenge the Facebook behemoth, but unless Google works harder on Google+ there may not be an alternative.
