> Google+ is a joke in social networking, but it could be the canary in the coal mine for Google itself, because it showcases that Google fundamentally doesn't understand how people and advertising work. Engineers generally don't understand people, and behavior is core to both social networking and the advertising that funds it.

The classic people-smarter-than-me-must-be-fundamentally-stunted-somehow argument...always a great sign of a credible opinion.

Does Enderle, the OP, not think much of the report that Google engineers independently came up with a Nobel Prize winning economics theory that made AdWords so successful?

http://books.google.com/books?id=V1u1f8sv3k8C&pg=PA90...

I've said it before, as have many others - obtrusion, advertising, and reduced utility will kill every 'social network' until the end of time that uses the Facebook/MySpace model.

The same doesn't hold true for Google. Search makes up an inordinate percentage of their revenue compared to development effort, it seems, and this drives a lot of internal innovation, some of which has worked and some of which hasn't.

This article is all over the place. The conclusion: "...Facebook and Google don't understand either social networking or advertising..." might be true for Facebook (with regards to advertising), but certainly isn't true for Google. Facebook will be able to buy the advertising chops, and Google's problem with social is they're trying to do social Google's way, but they can afford a few more false starts before they get it to work.