Google wants yo momma on Google+. Google's customers demand it

As I noted in my Thursday morning post, I received an invite to Google+ courtesy Mark Trapp. As can be expected in any beta environment, many of the Google+ participants are early adopter types.

And that suits Robert Scoble just fine:

Come on now, we geeks and early adopters and social media gurus need a place to talk free of folks who think Justin Bieber is the second coming of Christ. That’s what we have in Google+ right now. Do we really want to mess that up?

Let me clue you in on a little secret - those of us in the Google+ invite aren't exclusively talking about the merits of various development processes. Scoble's own post title (and my own) alludes to a slew of Google+ themed "yo momma" jokes that are bouncing around (jokes that include words like "huddle"). FriendFeed users have already seen a rather infamous poster of a large Asian man whose nipples are being licked by other Asian men.

But - and perhaps you should sit down before you read the rest of this sentence - this is not where Google wants Google+ to be.

While Google admittedly creates some properties for geekier types, Google's customers demand that services such as Google+ become compelling destinations for a much wider audience. Google's customers want yo momma, and yo grandmomma, to get with the service.

You just have to remember who Google+'s customers are. And they're not Robert Scoble, or his wife, or my daughter (referenced in my first comment to Scoble's post).

Google's customers are its advertisers.

Google wants to attract people away from Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo so that they're looking at Google ads twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And Google wants as many people as possible to view those ads.

So today Google+ has video chat, but Google realizes that this is not enough to get eyeballs on those ads. And the present level of integration probably isn't enough either. (Picasa is not the game-changer here. I have tons of pictures in Picasa because of my Blogger blogs, and I still haven't visited Picasa yet.)

Expect Google to incrementally add features to Google+ that will draw more eyeballs to Google. That's how Google will keep its true customers happy.

Incidentally, my second comment addresses the "yo momma" comment that Robert Scoble (and I) used in our post titles, and how the very use of that title reinforces Scoble's view of the Google+ community - basically, the Justin Bieber-loving masses who did not score Google+ invites presumably never saw all the Google+ "yo momma" jokes, and therefore "don't get it."