In responding to the growing challenges posed by Facebook in the late 2000s and early of 2010s, the biggest blunder Google has made was trying to develop yet another "closed" social networking platform - Google Plus that mimicked Facebook's self-contained social networking ecosystem.
Traditionally, Google has been known as the champion of the open nature of the Internet. It started overtaking Microsoft's industry leader position in the mid of 2000s by introducing several products that leveraged on the openness of Internet and the world wide Internet community's anti-proprietary sentiment : blogger (blogspot.com), Google Reader, GMail, Chrome, Adsense, Adwords and etc.
In short, throughout 2000s, Google has been playing "semi-opensource" strategy besides riding on the World Wide Web's open, borderless and diverse principles in winning over the global Internet community's admiration.
Instead of creating another closed social networking platform to counter Facebook's growing presence in the Internet industry, Google should have sticked with the heavy investment into the technology platforms that centered around blogsphere and blogger ecosystem which encourage the sharing and navigation of Information in an open online ecosystem.
That could have been attracting blogger communities around the world to continue developing the influence of blogs as the main alternative media, credible source of truth and major discussion platforms for social, economics and politics.
Google's decision to abandon the battlefield on blogsphere in the late 2000s and the early of 2010s has indirectly resulted global online communities shifting their discussions and online mobilization from the "open-ended" blogshere to the "closed-ended" Facebook.
Maybe the world could have been seeing less impact of the state-sponsored facebook and twitter fake news propaganda during the 2016 US Presidential Election campaign period if the Internet communities were still actively visiting blogs as their main online news sources.
Posts
0 Comments