It's only a blunder if it doesn't work. And that depends not on the bonus but whether there's a clear top-down plan for a well-defined social product. Bottom-up development, where each team figures out whether/how to integrate into +1... that will probably amount to nothing revolutionary. If social "features" are just spread like jam around all of Google's offerings, the result will be a sticky mess that nobody wants to touch.
But Google has a good fall-back position with +1, since the worst case scenario is that it simply evolves into a global digg/reddit-style thumb's up signal for the relevancy of a search result (which alone would be a great result). Beyond that, success in "social" will depend on having a well-defined product that's good enough to sell itself, so I basically agree with the article.
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It's only a blunder if it doesn't work. And that depends not on the bonus but whether there's a clear top-down plan for a well-defined social product. Bottom-up development, where each team figures out whether/how to integrate into +1... that will probably amount to nothing revolutionary. If social "features" are just spread like jam around all of Google's offerings, the result will be a sticky mess that nobody wants to touch.
But Google has a good fall-back position with +1, since the worst case scenario is that it simply evolves into a global digg/reddit-style thumb's up signal for the relevancy of a search result (which alone would be a great result). Beyond that, success in "social" will depend on having a well-defined product that's good enough to sell itself, so I basically agree with the article.