UPDATED 11:13 EDT / OCTOBER 20 2011

NEWS

Google+ to Amp Up Offerings: “We do not Believe in Over-Sharing”

At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Google’s senior vice president in charge of Google+ Vic Gundotra talked about the future of Google+.

Gundotra talked about how Google+ is different from Facebook in Twitter in so many ways.  First off, they want people not only to use Google+ but also other Google services.  The point here is, the more people use Google services, the more they would be enticed to use and share stuff on Google+ since their products are integrated.  Also, they do not plan on taking a leaf from Facebook’s pages of making people share everything like what they’re listening to on Spotify.

“Our strategy is not to win by just users who come to Google+,” Mr. Gundotra said. “It’s to activate the users of existing Google services like search, Maps and Android.”

“We do not believe in over-sharing,” he added. “There is a reason why every thought in your head does not come out of your mouth. We think a core attribute to be human is to curate, in how others perceive you and what you say.”

He also added that Google+ will get more features like allowing people to use pseudonyms, custom profile addresses and brand pages.  Though after Gundotra’s announcement, he received a lot of e-mails, mostly from women, asking him to continue with their policy of using real names and not pseudonyms.  So the pseudonym use might not actually push through. In the near future, developers would be able to build apps for Google+ which Gundotra said that Google would not do what others did, like Twitter, who invited developers to build apps for them but made competing products themselves.

“By Christmas,” Gundotra said, “you’ll really start to see the Google+ strategy come together.”

Google co-founder Sergey Brin was also present and touched on other subject matter like Larry Page as the new CEO and Google as a brand.  Page was CEO before Eric Schmidt took over in 2001 and this is Page’s second turn as CEO and employees said that he is more mellow and patient with employees.

“I think that Larry has done a really good job rallying the company together,” Brin said, focusing Google so there is “a consistent look, a consistent function to the key Google services, so you’re not thinking about it like it’s 1,000 little startups, but you’re really having a coherent user experience.”

And Brin reiterated that his role in the company is to make sure they push for innovation.

“That’s my job. I do have responsibility for some of these (research efforts) now, but we are a little bit strategic about them. Early when we started the company, we didn’t have much of a brand,” Brin said. “Now, with the Google brand behind it, we’ve launched some weaker services, obviously, and they’ve gotten a lot of traction just because of the Google brand. We don’t want to be left with complicated array of perhaps good, but not great, services.”


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