There’s an enormous amount of speculation swirling around Google+, the search giant’s six-month-old social network. In a frank “fireside chat” at this year’s South By South West (SXSW) festival tech guru Guy Kawasaki prodded Vic Gundotra, head of Google+, into revealing some surprising insights.

Kawasaki opened with a simple question: what exactly is the service supposed to be? Although Gundotra demurred briefly, saying that the service was “many things to many people” he soon got to the point. “At its simplest, Google+ is a social layer across all of Google’s services. We realised that if we could build a unifying social layer we could make Google better.”

Gundotra illustrated the power of this layer with a simple example: “Imagine we knew just one more piece of data about you: for instance, that you are a vegetarian. When you search for restaurants, aren’t we going to prioritise vegetarian restaurants? Of course we are!”

“But where do you draw the line here? Are you still not doing any evil?” quipped Kawasaki, drawing a laugh from the crowd. Gundotra, unruffled, pointed out that if Google behaved badly or abused people’s data, they could migrate away from its services “with a single click”.

When asked by an audience member whether you can you correct Google’s filters about yourself — teaching it, for instance, that you’re not in fact a vegetarian — Gundotra is unequivocal. “Yes, you can. We expose all of that via your Google Dashboard.”

Gundotra is clearly frustrated by the rumours that Google+ is a “ghost town” filled with dead accounts and not much activity. “We have more than 50m daily active users and 100m 30-day-actives. That’s the fastest growing service we’ve ever seen at Google.”

In fact the unexpectedly rapid growth of the service explains a lot of problems and bottlenecks the service has suffered. An irate audience member brings up the issue of pseudonyms, which Google+ explicitly forbade until a few months ago. “We grossly underestimated the need for pseudonyms when we launched. But we believe we’ve done it right now.”

The same applies to the public Google+ application programming interface (API). The API does not currently allow external developers to inject (write) data to the system. Gundotra explained that he wanted to “avoid the pollution of streams” that can result from opening up a “write” API. He explained that Google never foresaw the need for it to be open so early.

“We don’t want to open up the API, give everyone write access and then have to revoke it later. We want to do it properly.” But Kawasaki, obviously frustrated by this limitation, was unwilling to concede the point and neither were the crowd, who joined him in heckling Gundotra.

“Why can’t you just do it way the other guys are doing it?” insisted Kawasaki. “They’re all Facebook developers — they’re used to that (constant API changes).” Unruffled, Gundotra shot back. “We hold ourselves to a higher standard,” drawing laughter and gasps from the audience. “And that’s what frustrates me,” Gundotra continued. “All these people are saying that Google+ is a ghost town and yet there are developers clamouring to get in! It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Perhaps the most surprising revelation by Gundotra was that Google does not foresee the need to advertise within Google+. “When it comes to social services — people are still there to be social. We don’t think that’s the right place for ads.”

But Gundotra is quick to enthuse about the possibilities and opportunities of what he calls “socially annotated” advertising. He explains this by way of an example: you are looking for a charity to donate money to, and so you google your favourite cause. In the ads next to the results you see that a local charity has received a “+1” from one of your friends. “These ads are already getting a 5% to 10% ‘uplift’ in click rates,” says Gundotra, “and we’ve only just started.”

Listening to Gundotra, you can’t help but think Google finally “gets” social. After years of false starts and high profile failures, it finally has a recipe that seems to play to its strengths. But it needs to put these “ghost town” accusations to bed once and for all. Gundotra may be charming, but he can’t convince the entire world to agree with him. Google+ will have to do that on its own. — Alistair Fairweather, TechCentral