A different kind of social

Despite a healthy skepticism for all things Google attempts with social, Wave and Buzz not having helped very much, I was quite excited after I saw the presentation below by Google’s Paul Adams. (the link which I had shared last week) It meant that Google Me was worth keeping a watch on. No, not the movie, the service.

[Read Mahendra’s excellent key takeaways+thoughts post if you need a quick snapshot without having to read 216 pages.]

I was quite impressed with the scope of the presentation – from looking at people’s motivations behind their ‘social’ actions to the insights that have been gleaned. I must admit that i was a bit surprised that Google, or at least its employees took social this seriously. Good to know that Facebook and Zuckerberg’s stated aim of 1 billion users in the near future is finally pushing Google to do something other than killing of services (Jaiku, Dodgeball…) or making a mockery of itself in front of its competitors with half baked products. And that they’re doing research too. My first thought, after I finished reading the document was

Its ironic that Google faces a ‘What Would Google Do’ on itself. The good news is that there is enough scope for developing a network for context based social relationships and transactions. Like I said in my last post, the tools available still don’t allow me the freedom to aggregate and disaggregate connections and content at will in different contexts. It is possible to build a social network around many contexts – enterprise/professional use, location, family, interests and so on. I even saw an interesting app built for ‘proximity based networking’ – it syncs your existing networks – Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace with location and thereby does a twist on location based networking, with seemingly good privacy controls.

The bad news is that Mark Zuckerberg won’t take too kindly to encroachments in his space. As if ‘friends’ weren’t universal enough (at least inside the FB universe – including Connect), ‘Like’ is even more universal, and Facebook’s recent play is aimed at pipping Google’s (relative) ability to deliver the most relevant content to the user. It doesn’t help that social doesn’t seem to be what Google’s comfortable with.

But assuming Google Me is a social platform of some sort, what I’m wondering is that how many users would use Facebook lesser for a service which allows context to be brought into the picture. There’s something really simple about the ‘sharing’ on Facebook. For a service that used to be labeled ‘complex’ in the Orkut era, it has come far. Users have adapted. Also, how difficult is it for Facebook, which already has a massive userbase to introduce features that allow a user to create sub identities to splice and dice friends (already has lists) and content and choose what to use outside the network? It already has filters to control the kind of information I want to see on my newsfeed, these can be improved too.

The other thing is how/where Google would build this – a separate service/ something around or integrated with iGoogle/Buzz (brrr)/Chrome (browser or OS)/ Search itself ? A lot of the design would be based on this. And how can it balance the simplicity of Facebook sharing with the more complex needs of context and privacy?

A larger perspective is that we’re nowhere close to the end game as far as our (probably seamless in the future) network of digital and real activities go. Its having a larger impact than what we sometimes credit it for. In fact, we are only discovering how the web is changing our behaviour and even perhaps motivations. A few of us have yet to decide whether we want to sync our multiple online identities. And that means that though Facebook is probably the most accepted solution now, its by no means the perfect one, even for our current understanding. Facebook, Google and the ones we haven’t even heard about are all Work In Progress, but boy, what interesting work it is! No monopoly, lots of chance and multiple community chests 🙂

until next time, google yourself 🙂