I heard this nugget about Google+ while listening to the latest This Week in Tech (#616: That s N...

[G+_Roy Hembree]

I heard this nugget about Google+ while listening to the latest This Week in Tech (#616: That’s Not a Hot Dog). Leo Laporte, Clayton Morris, and Dan Patterson were discussing the data silos held by Google and Facebook and the value of those silos for advertisers. I suspect that they’re on to something about Google+.

 

Leo: I’d say Google has twice the information Facebook does though, right?

 

Clayton: I don’t know. Do they? I mean, remember when Facebook wouldn’t allow itself to show up in Google Search? That great battle, that great Wired Magazine article. What was it, like eight year ago? And that incredible battle where Facebook was keeping all of that data because that was the Holy Grail for Google. The more personalized data: the moods, the vacations, the information that you can’t get from a simple Google search.

 

Dan: I think Google can get that data.

 

Leo: I think Google gets it peripherally.

 

Dan: Yeah.

 

Clayton: They tried with Google+.

 

Dan: I think that’s why they stopped caring about Google+. They did like “Oh, you know, the value proposition here isn’t as strong as we thought it was.” I could be wrong.

 

Leo: They wanted to get Facebook stuff, but I think that’s in effect what happened was they said “We don’t need that. We get it anyway.” Just because if you just use Google for all your searches and you use Google devices and even if you’re using an iPhone you may be using Google Assistant, you’re probably using Google Search, email. You’re getting so many signals. And really I don’t think it’s a question of how much data you have at this point, it’s how much intelligence you can apply to the data you have to make the connections. I feel like Facebook is certainly data rich but I feel like computer scientists at Google maybe are a little bit, I don’t know, that’s a really interesting question.