Think Long, Think Wrong

MG Siegler, on Google removing his Google+ profile picture without warning because he was flipping the bird:

Google continues to walk this oddly vague line when it comes to Google+. At first it was all about real identity, like Facebook, but then when people complained, they backtracked from that. Now it’s all about “sharing in real life” — but it’s not real life. It’s some sterile representation of real life.

Google+ is having an identity crisis. This is understandable and even acceptable given how young the product is. But, as Apple learned when they dragged out publicly documenting the App Store’s app approval guidelines, the longer the Google+ team drags out their soul searching the worse this will get and the less relevant they will be.

Unfortunately, whereas Apple has always had the leading app store — they effectively created the term “app store” — Google+ is still struggling to justify to the majority of the world why it should be used instead of Facebook.