Why Google Pac-Man worked and Google wallpaper flopped

Last month Google surprisingly turned its homepage logo into a playable game of Pac-Man to commemorate the video game’s thirtieth anniversary, and it was a huge hit. This week Google pulled a vaguely similar publicity stunt by adding wallpaper photos to the background of its homepage, yet it didn’t find the same success. In fact, the Pac-Man game proved so popular that Google felt compelled to relaunch it on a hidden page hours after removing it, and to this day the game is still there and still playable, a seeming permanent homage to the occasion. In contrast, the wallpaper was so overwhelmingly unpopular that the company quietly yanked it within hours and it’s certainly not surfaced on a hidden page. So why did one stunt work so well, and the other fail so badly?

It’s worth pointing out that with the addition of a search bar built into most modern web browsers these days, the only two groups of users who even routinely see the Google homepage are those geeks and pundits so far inside the beltway that they pay attention to every last detail of everything that Google does, and on the other end of the spectrum those users so unsophisticated that they don’t even know how to search bar works or that it exists and they’re thusly still typing in “google.com” before commencing with their search. Statistically speaking, while nearly everyone uses Google for searching, almost no one visits the google.com homepage on a regular basis. So, assuming the web’s least sophisticated users aren’t the ones voicing the loud opinions on the Pac-Man and the wallpaper, and seeing how the typical middle of the road internet user isn’t stopping at google.com before searching anyway, it’s safe to assume that the opinions you’re hearing are coming from those pundits and insiders. As such, one can’t assume that the opinions being loudly voiced on the matter are typical of what the general public would think on the matter if they’d been the ones discovering it and opining about it.

That having been said, the pundit reactions to both the wallpaper and the PacMan appear to be rooted in basic human nature. No one likes sudden change without a good reason, and so after a decade of becoming accustomed to google.com being a nearly empty utilitarian white page, the sudden morphosis into something that looked like it was redesigned by Microsoft was jarring and didn’t appear to have a valid reason, and perhaps most importantly, evoked fear that it might be permanent. Users want to feel that permanent changes were their decision, not that of someone else. Even a PC users who’s tentatively planning on switching to Mac is likely to be upset if he wakes up one day and suddenly finds that the Windows OS on his PC has somehow been swapped out for the Mac OS without warning.

In contrast, the Pac-Man game represented something for nothing: the opportunity to play a free iconic video game throughout the day without having to first hunt it down, and thusly felt like it wasn’t a mere gimmick for gimmickery’s sake. Moreover, both because of how strangely out of place it was, and the fact that it was done on an anniversary, no one feared that Google’s logo might permanently become a game of Pac-Man. It’s why no one complains when Google alters its logo for holidays, even when those temporary changes to the logo make it all but unreadable, as was the case this week when the Google logo morphed into a game of soccer in honor of the start of the World Cup; even those who detested the temporary logo, or detest soccer in general, were likely to complain because they knew it would be gone in a day.

Lessons learned? If you’re going to make drastic yet temporary changes, do so in such a manner that it’s immediately and inherently clear that the change is temporary; if it’s the kind of change that you have to pre-announce as being temporary, you might want to rethink the nature of it. And if you’re making a drastic change with the hope of making it permanent, try to get your core stakeholders on board with it first, or at least make sure they understand what’s about to happen. In the case of Google Pac-Man, no explanation was necessary, and tech pundits served as Google’s greatest marketers that day as they spread what they saw as good news. With Google wallpaper, those same tech pundits shouted it down before mainstream users even knew what had happened; if Google could have somehow gotten those pundits on board first, the wallpaper experiment might have played out differently.

Only one of my friends quit Facebook today, how about you?

I lost a friend today. Or so says Facebook, which reports that I now have one fewer “friend” than I began the day with. I don’t know the identity of the friend who deserted me today, but I’m guessing that the abandonment had less to do with something I said and more to do with the fact that today was Quit Facebook Day, a campaign with attacked Facebook over privacy issues and compared quitting Facebook to (I’m not making this up) quitting smoking. Nevermind that smoking will alienate you from most of society and eventually kill you, while the worst that Facebook can do is share super “private” information about you with the world including secrets like (gasp) your name and (oh, no!) your birthday.

So did the campaign work? Well, I began the day with one thousand seven hundred and sixty-seven Facebook friends and I also ended it with 1767, a result of having lost one unidentified friend and then having gained a new one later in the day. I’d say my Facebook friendbase is fairly broad and typical, including everyone from friends and family to industry acquaintances and former co-workers, so if I lost less than one tenth of one percent of my friends, it’s fairly safe to assume that less than one tenth of one percent of all Facebook users quit the service today overall. That’s a monumental flop in my book. And yet some have already referred to Quit Facebook Day as a success even before it began, simply because it brought attention to the Facebook privacy issue. I don’t see it that way; what the campaign told the world is that nearly all Facebook users would rather stick with the service, warts and all, than give it up entirely.

“I quit Facebook today and all I got was this lousy MySpace!”

Quit Facebook Day, a campaign so misguided that it scheduled its event on a national holiday during which mainstream Facebook users are most likely to be nowhere near their computers anyway, has predictably flopped – if my loss of a whopping zero out of my current seventeen hundred-plus Facebook friends is any indication. While we’ll never know whether the creators of the “day” were truly attempting to effect positive change or were merely using the recent anti-Facebook PR in an attempt to carry out a geek agenda against service, the public backing of Quit Facebook Day by certain anarchist geeks whose reasons for leaving Facebook had more to do with their own distaste for the non-geekiness of Facebook and its userbase here in 2010 than any motives relating to actual privacy concerns. But in any case, the fact that the campaign received so much national attention yet resulted in a mere 26,000 signups tells us what we already knew before the clock struck midnight: quitting Facebook is no way to fix Facebook.

For social network early adopters, the lesson was learned years ago: Twitter was the only service of its specific type that had any traction, and yet it had terrible problems with uptime which more than once prompted an attempted mass exodus to competing sites like Jaiku and others you’ve never heard of unless you were a part of the mix back then. The reason why such attempted mass migrations never worked was that no one on those services like Jaiku; the few who switched over found themselves to talking to a handful of strangers or no one at all, gave up, and came back. Similarly, the 2010 campaign to try to get users to abandon Facebook has failed because nowhere on the QuitFacebookDay.com site is there a suggestion of what viable alternative the quitters are supposed to then turn to. Sure, we’ve seen some spam here about this or that tiny open source social network which is supposedly going to be the “next Facebook” if it can just get over the hump of only having three current users, but when it comes down to it there’s nowhere to go but Facebook (MySpace is a past-tense wasteland and Twitter is simply too different of a service to be a Facebook replacement), asking mainstream Facebook users to give up social networking entirely is just not the answer.

So what is the solution when it comes to getting Facebook to see it users’ way when it comes to privacy and respect? I’ve said it before: I don’t have that answer, at least not in any specific terms, and not yet. But I do know that winning the philosophical debate with Facebook’s founders (which is what this is, as there’s no actual privacy risk to participating in Facebook, despite what paranoid geek anarchists claim) is a fight which won’t be won by taking our ball and going back to the twentieth century. While some next generation service may indeed eventually replace Facebook just as Facebook replaced MySpace and what all came before, we’re not anywhere near that happening right now. So even as today’s small handful of Facebook quitters now move on to some tiny open source social network for a few days before quietly sneaking back onto Facebook out of frustration by the end of the week (or retreat back to the odorously rotting MySpace for a bit before getting tired of holding their noses and returning), the rest of us will stick with Facebook and try to find a solution to the problem together. I’m open to ideas; you should be too.