When Larry Page told Googlers that he was tying their bonuses to their abilities in social, it lit a fire under their collective behinds, and got the teams working hand in hand to get Google users able to browse the web hand in hand. That’s why we’ve seen so many updates lately. Yesterday, Google made another update, by allowing users to easily manage their contacts and filters right from Gmail and Contacts.
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The mandate here at Social Times is to predict emerging social networks (i.e. not Twitter and Facebook), and I’ve been watching Google Plus very closely since it launched. Many saw it as the third major ‘social’ product, after Google Wave and Google Buzz, which both were ill-fated and poorly executed from the start. However, Google Plus was in fact the first major, concerted social product released after CEO Larry Page tied every single employee’s bonuses to the success of social. This is why I think the network is here to stay, and that’s why I believe that the people who call it a failure already may be speaking prematurely — but what can they do to steal users from Facebook?
Google has been spending a lot of time tweaking with their design, lately. From unveiling a new social network to cleaning up GMail (and renaming it Google Mail), someone at Google has clearly recognized the importance of User Experience (UX) design. Today, they unveiled a new concept: a big clickable Google button in the top left of every Google page. They call it the Google Bar.
