Until now, Google has not had to care about the coolness factor. They weren't in the social space. Now that they are, just look at how Google+ has fizzled. They pulled the worst stunt you possibly could have pulled when you're trying to be cool: hold a line-up outside your club only to have people come in and find out nobody is inside and the party sucks.
Step 6 has definitely already happened. Remember what is cool is not necessarily what is popular. Cool is the derivative of popularity though. At any given time, if you want to find out what will become popular later on, just find out what's cool. Twitter has 106 M users vs Facebook's 500 M as of 2010. It's clearly not as popular as Facebook. But Twitter's growth has been faster (and more sustainable than Google+'s initial exponential growth) than Facebook's was. The trend is keeping up and as much as we can laugh and joke about the utility of Twitter, I'd say that it is already at Step 4. You already are finding people that want to move onto something else that's cool (which IMHO is what drove the initial adoption of Google+).
We can relearn all of these lessons or we can just admit that we're really doing social businesses and these sort of things have been around for a long time. How they work is well known. Just, up until this past decade or so, we'd never seen them in the technology space.
Step 6 has definitely already happened. Remember what is cool is not necessarily what is popular. Cool is the derivative of popularity though. At any given time, if you want to find out what will become popular later on, just find out what's cool. Twitter has 106 M users vs Facebook's 500 M as of 2010. It's clearly not as popular as Facebook. But Twitter's growth has been faster (and more sustainable than Google+'s initial exponential growth) than Facebook's was. The trend is keeping up and as much as we can laugh and joke about the utility of Twitter, I'd say that it is already at Step 4. You already are finding people that want to move onto something else that's cool (which IMHO is what drove the initial adoption of Google+).
We can relearn all of these lessons or we can just admit that we're really doing social businesses and these sort of things have been around for a long time. How they work is well known. Just, up until this past decade or so, we'd never seen them in the technology space.