Digital Design Blog

Google’s Krauss On Connecting People, Killer Apps

We’ve been doing a lot of work lately on understanding consumer digital behavior and the adoption curve of Internet technologies. Needless to say, sociability or “connectedness” has been driving much of our findings and is starting to really up-end some of our clients (and or own) conceptions of what works for brands online.

Joe Krauss, Director of Product Management at Google, in an interview with Kevin Werbach, Wharton, has one of the best POVs on this. Choice excerpt:

So, the killer apps that have really worked on the web have always been about connecting people to one
another. So, whether it is instant messaging and e-mail as communications to connect people to one
another, whether it’s photo-sharing as a way to connect people to one another through photos, or
blogging as a way to connect people to one another through the words, people have always been social
and the killer apps that have really succeeded on the web have always been social.

And this:

Well, I think, the notion is that if you look at the way social activity happens today, a lot of it is
concentrated in social networks — MySpace, Facebook, and depending on what your geography is,
there’s usually a dominant social network in your geography. It is a global phenomenon, with hundreds and hundreds of millions of users in these social networks.

What’s interesting about it is that it’s kind of an odd concept at a bigger level, which is that I have to go
to a particular site in order to be social with my friends. It reminds me a lot of the early days of user
generated content. Before people realized that was a scheme, they thought it was a set of sites. I went to Wikipedia to do user generated content. Or I went to a shopping review site or a product review site to do user generated content.

And then slowly but surely, people recognized that user generated content isn’t a site, it is a concept that can be applied to almost every site. And so today, almost anywhere I go on the web, I have the ability to rate something, leave a comment, or write a review. From the New York Times to Amazon, I have an ability to now contribute to the conversation going on across the web.

Full, long and well worth reading interview, here.