While discussing technology predictions for 2014 to Bloomberg, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt took a moment to reflect on the company's past and expressed regret for not anticipating social.
"The biggest mistake that I made was not anticipating the rise of the social networking phenomenon - not a mistake we're going to make again," admitted Schmidt during an interview with Bloomberg TV. "I guess, in our defense, we were busy working on many other things. But we should have been in that area, and I take responsibility for that."
In June 2011, Google launched Google+, its answer to Facebook, but by that time Facebook had already become a household name. By October this year, Google+ had 540 million users compared to 1.9 billion users of Facebook.
In recent times, Google has put a lot of effort into increasing the presence of Google+ by taking various measures, including integrating YouTube comments with Google+ accounts.
"We've been consolidating the different services, so today Search, YouTube, the Google Play app store, all this plugs into Google+. And the reason for that is that Google+ is kind of like the next version of Google," said Steve Grove, Google's director of partnerships for Google+ in an interview with Livemint.
Grove said Google+ is also partnering with celebrities and major companies to generate content. "Google+ is a content-centric social network, and we've got a lot of valuable content from partners, because they're posting things specifically to Google+. I'm talking about content that's unique across the Web. This brings in a ton of value," he said.
