Google’s Google+ now has 40 million users. “Not bad for a first month,” said Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering, on Wednesday.
“It exceeded our wildest expectations,” Gundotra said, as he and Sergey Brin appeared on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
Although Google has it fingers in any number of pies, interlocutor John Battelle focused mainly on the differences between Google+ and Facebook.
Brin and Gundotra said that over 3.4 billion photos have been uploaded to Google+, after Google “freed” them from the smartphone, he said. And pseudonyms are coming, after users complained about being forced to use real names, rather than nicknames or handles. Tying Google+ to Google Apps should be coming in a few days, Gundotra added. Brand pages are coming, not in days, but shortly, he said. A more coherent Google+ strategy should arrive by Christmas, Gundotra said.
Brin, who was intimately involved in the design of Google+, professed himself pleased with the progress. “I’m not a very social person myself; I have spent time on social networks, Friendster, or Orkut… or Facebook or Twitter,” Brin said. “I haven’t been active on many of them,” but he did so because of his job. “Google+ instantly felt compelling.”
“There is a reason that every thought in your head does not come out your mouth,” Gundotra said, when asked about the open graph and open sharing model that Facebook uses.
How can Google address the problem of attracting mainstream users? Gundotra said that Facebook has a huge advantage. But most users are actually on Google, and one day, every user might see an icon in the top right notifying them that their long-lost friend has joined the system.
“I completely agree with you that some of our products and services seem scattered over the past few years,” Brin said, insisting that the company is trying to clean them up.
“In some ways we’ve always run the company in letting a thousand flowers bloom. But once they do bloom, you want to pay together a coherent bouquet,” he said.
Batelle also asked Brin to respond to a comment by Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer, who claimed that Microsoft was “winning winning winning winning” over Google in online apps, like Office Live versus Google Apps. Over 4 million businesses use Google Apps, and when Brin asked for a show of hands, a large percentage of the audience said they used them.
Brin and Gundotra said the morale at Google is at a high, after Larry Page was named chief executive.
“There is something going on Google that’s hard to explain unless you’re there … when Mary Meeker put up her slide up on the Android momentum, there was an audible gasp. But the momentum is there,” Gundotra said.
Brin said he is actively working on the autonomous car project. “I’m optimistic that will happen,” he said of the chance that it will be brought to market.
Battelle also asked about the “platforms” memo that appeared on Google+. “I will be lying to you if I told you that wasn’t a bad thing,” Gundotra said. The employee didn’t work on the Google+ development team, but wasn’t fired.
“On the other hand, it gave the outside world a window in how we work at the team,” Gundotra said.
But Gundotra also said he would take a “cautious approach” to APIs. “When we release an API we want developers to have high confidence that they can depend on Google.”
“We’re working on it,” Gundotra said.
