Google is on a mission…
Their incredibly aggressive nagging to get you to get a G+ account is now a daily occurrence in your Google travels.
So what is the agenda behind this persistent (and often lame) nagging?
You could surmise that it is just another ham handed way to get you to use Google+ to compete with Facebook, however there is more to the plot here. This is merely a campaign to get you to join Google +. A campaign to get you to post on G+ would look dramatically different.
At this point, at least, they don’t really care if you never post on +. Google is on a mission is to get full embrace of their single login logic, system wide social backbone.
For the moment, that is a much more valuable “commodity” to them than 200 word Google+ post here and there. The benefits to Google (and to a lesser extent their users) of this plan are many.
- This will dramatically reduce the friction between their many products.
- Reduced friction will mean increased use across all of their product.
- This increased use will in itself allow Google to better personalize your results.
- Google will be better able to manage and limit the impact of those who violate their rules.
By improving the stickiness of their sites, they will also reduce abandonment and increase pleasure.
They are trading the short term pain of nagging for sign up to Google + accounts in the hope that when the time comes that 400 or 500 (or 800) million users securely log in then cross product usage will increase.
We can only hope that this also translates to a decrease in spam and a happier more user friendly product range.
Lower friction potentially means less abandonment, higher usage, more page views and greater user satisfaction.
Bottom line for Google is that this all translates to more opportunity to show ad inventory. So if you haven’t noticed already, look out for the nagging – they just want you to get a G+ account.