ParisLemon » Google To Unleash Hell on Social Networks

Google To Unleash Hell on Social Networks

I’ve determined that Google either reads my mind – or my blog (well I know at least one division does anyway). Steady readers of ParisLemon will know that there are a few topics that I seem to harp on non-stop. One is definitely Apple dropping the ball (thus far) with regards to controlling the living room with their digital media, another is the PS3’s bad moves in the next-gen video game console war, a big one is my hatred for espn.com who I think are the greediest people alive, and then there is my ongoing discussion about Google’s seemingly complete lack of social prowess on the Internet. Well if Mike Arrington of TechCrunch is to be believed (and there is no reason to think he shouldn’t be), Google is about ransack the social networking community by doing what they do best: allowing users to do just about anything they want while they sit back and keep track of it.

It sounds scary, it is kind of scary, but it is also pretty ingenious. Google is attempting to outflank Facebook by not just opening a platform from which 3rd parties can work within certain parameters, but instead opening pretty much everything. If that sounds vague, it is pretty vague, but come November 5th when a series of new APIs launch, we should know a whole lot more – and undoubtedly Google will know a lot more about us.

As I said, I’ve gone on and on about my confusion towards Google having all of this data from its dozens of apps, but not really doing much of anything with it socially. I’ve written about it here, I’ve written about it on Pronet, I’ve written about it wherever I could. It just didn’t make a lot of sense to me. The past few weeks they’ve started taking babysteps, but we’ve heard whispers of much larger things on the horizon – and this will be it.

Look for Google to tie all of their products together socially and make the web seem like a smaller place. Look for cool stuff like an ultimate RSS/Web page bookmarker that I envisioned just yesterday. Whereas most people get paranoid when a company like Google tries to do anything too all-encompassing, I get excited, I see it as a potential sea-change, something that can take the Internet to the next level. We’ll see.

Post by MG Siegler on 09/21/07
Comments

Webomatica

Totally agree. I'm finding I'm logged into GMail or Google Reader more and more often. They already have my "friends" list in the form of email contacts. They have GTalk. Looking forward to whatever they come up with.

Sig

Scraps

MG Siegler

@webomatica - yeah I think there is a fine line from people feeling as if things are very convenient to people feeling paranoid how much a company knows about them. Maybe I'm too trusting, but I'm all about convenience and anything that can save me time.

Jordan Mitchell

Google has access to much much more information than anyone wants to believe. If they opened up *everything* they know about each of us to 3rd parties, it would drain the color in our collective faces and cause major problems for them.

I trust they will open things up and it will be ingenious, but they won't open up everything. I think they're too far past that point.

MG Siegler

@jordan - very true, if they let out all they know there would be A TON of personal privacy issues. that would last for about an hour before Google was forced to close everything again.

Just look at what happened last year when Facebook started their main page 'feed' that laid out info of your contacts as they updated - people were freaking out, and that was just data that was already available, just more difficult to get to.

I only like the idea of Google making my life simpler by tying a lot of the services I use together, not by making what sites I visit and stuff like that public.

Jesse

It sounds like you're talking about the ultimate social graph. Here are a couple of articles on that topic: What is a Social Graph? and What happens when a Social Graph is compromised?