Beth, you’ve got it. Google is great at engineering & managing data, but they suck at designing social stuff.

Rick, I don’t trust Google at all. It’s a company. It’s ultimately driven by profits, not people’s well-being. I still use Google for searching, email and other things, because they design good products in that regard. But trust them? Hell no.

They are awesome at pulling together, managing, and presenting vast quantities of general data. That’s why their search engine rocks. That’s why GMail and Reader rock. That’s why Maps rocks so hard it blows every other online mapping service out of the water.

What they are not so hot at is understanding the social side of data, because the social stuff is hard to engineer – maybe it can’t be engineered in the traditional sense because it needs to concentrate more on the human, rather than the technological. Engineering alone isn’t enough (neither for that matter, is design or a usability study). If you want to make something social, you’ve first got to understand people. Google hasn’t quite figured that out yet. And given the company culture, maybe they won’t ever figure that out (which would be a pity). But until they do, I don’t think they’re ever going to get the social space quite right.

So yeah, if their next big launch is yet another social thing, I’m probably going to do just what I did with Buzz – turn it off. If it’s something that plays more to their strengths, I may find it useful. Either way, I know what Google’s good at what what Google is not so good at, and I can use its services accordingly.

I’d argue it’s not just Google, but a general dismissal of privacy concerns in the tech industry. Witness Mark Zuckerberg talking about the changes to privacy settings for Facebook as ‘reflecting social norms’ (ignoring the fact that they become norms by social networking services establishing them), or pundits like Jeff Jarvis barking about “self-appointed privacy advocates”.