Prognostication is always a risky endeavor, especially when it concerns anything related to the Internet (or the Apocalypse), but I’ll risk looking stupid and offer the following prediction:

Google+ will be a success.
The conventional wisdom says that Google doesn’t have social media in its corporate DNA. Maybe there’s a kernel of truth to this idea, but it obscures another fact: Google already has a handful of high-performing social properties in its portfolio. YouTube, Blogger, and Gmail, to name a few. [1]

None of these is a social network in the strict Facebook or Twitter sense, but they’re all examples of social media to the extent that they’re for connecting with people, sharing, and creating an online identity. Hitwise classifies YouTube as a social network and lists it second only to Facebook in visitor share — and far ahead of Twitter and LinkedIn. (If you look at online video alone, there’s no contest: YouTube accounts for 43.1 percent of online videos viewed, according to comScore. Facebook accounts for 0.7 percent of videos viewed.)

Blogger has lost some of its influence, but the domain is still home to a quarter of a million blogs. (Tumblr, in comparison, has 64,193 sites.) A relative latecomer to the free-email scene, Gmail now has close to 200 million users and is steadily siphoning people from Yahoo Mail and Hotmail/Windows Live Mail, which tenuously hold the top spots. People might quibble with the notion that Gmail is an example of social media, but I’d argue that email is the original — and still indomitable — social app.

If Google doesn’t get the credit it deserves in the social media space, perhaps it’s because each of the company’s social platforms stands alone and has distinct branding. People don’t necessarily think of YouTube or Picasa as Google nameplates, which means Google’s reach is sometimes underestimated. For example, Hitwise’s list of the top 10 visited websites includes: Facebook (1), Google (2), YouTube (3), and Gmail (10).

If you aggregate each brand’s performance, you’ll see that Google is already competing quite well with Facebook in the social realm, with or without a successful Google+. A couple weeks ago, Google announced it had reached a billion users — a first for any Internet company.

How Google+ can succeed
Google+ will be successful if it can pull together the disparate social features that currently exist under the Google umbrella. The challenge is to create a cohesive user experience, where the shifts between sharing a picture, watching a video, and connecting with friends are as subtle and smooth as they are on Facebook. The demo looks promising.

It won’t be easy or happen overnight, but all of the puzzle pieces — including users — are already there, and Google has made great strides in the past few years in assembling all of their services into a unified whole. The rollout of personalized Google homepages (with a standard menu linking you to your other Google products) was the first and most critical step. You can see the continuation of this strategy in the recent Google Profiles redesign, which looks exactly like a profile in Google+. Once Google+ is available to all, I suspect people will have the option to simply merge the two.

If Google+ bombs, it’ll be tossed on the pile of failed Google projects — along with Buzz, Wave, and many others. Tech writers will once again trot out the idea that Google doesn’t have social in its DNA. Eventually, though, I see different story playing out. Over time Google will slowly organize its cacophony of social instruments into a single orchestra, and it will suddenly appear that they had a pretty good social strategy after all.

Or … I’ll look stupid.

——————-
[1] Sure, three of these aren’t Google creations — they were acquisitions. But if you apply the same scrutiny to Facebook, the company doesn’t look particularly innovative either. It came after Friendster, Myspace, and others had popularized social networking, and then there’s the question of whether Mark Zuckerberg created or, um, ‘acquired’ the company. Does Facebook have social in its DNA? I suppose it does if you look at its success as the proof. But you could make an argument that Facebook’s rise was as much about opportunism and luck than some kind of inherent genetic advantage.