Google NOT Building ‘Google Me’ Facebook Killer

Hugo Barra is not giving a head fake here, I don’t think:

Google denies building ‘Google Me’ Facebook rival - Telegraph

Hugo Barra, Google’s director of mobile product management, said: “We are not working on building a traditional social network platform.

“We do think ‘social’ is a key ingredient … but we think of it more broadly. We think of social as an ingredient rather than a vertical platform.”

Talking today at the Monaco Media Forum, on a panel discussing the impact of mobile apps on the desktop web, Barra said that Google was working on developing social apps, but not a specific new social network.

Instead, Google is jumping ahead and building social into the fabric of the mobile app framework. That’s smart, but we will have to see if Google can actually adroitly build the right componentry. Historically their sense of social hase been pretty awful: Orkut, Wave, Buzz, for example.

Can Google Go Social?

I have been watching Google’s frenetic quest to find an opening into the social revolution for a long time.

To date, what we have seen are experiments and acquisitions.

Having Gundotra lead social at Google reminds me of President Obama tapping General Petraeus to take on Afghanistan. It feels calming at the moment, but might not actually lead to the desired outcome.

On one one side, half-hearted hobbies that senior management hopes will grow into something great. In this category we have the more-or-less failed social network Orkut and now Wave, which both surfaced from the company’s ‘one day a week’ tinkering culture.

On the other, acquisitions like Jaiku and Dodgeball, which were innovative and groundbreaking, but were allowed to die in red tape, and where the innovative founders — like Jyri Engstrom of Jaiku, and Dennis Crowley of Dodgeball, soon left the company. Or great fat purchases like YouTube, which have proven to be less valuable than market prices.

Then, Google staged a relatively public search for a leader to move them to social. (Despite losing Jyri and Dennis, either of which could have done great things for the firm.) The result? Can’t find the right person. Catarina Fake couldn’t be lured back into corporate deadness, I guess. And Bradley Horowitz, who runs Google Talk, Grandcentral, Blogger and Picasa, wasn’t the right guy, apparently.

So now we have Vic Gundotra annointed as Mr Social, a guy who has made great strides at Google Mobile, getting Android into the market with a bang. But is he Mr Social?

Having Gundotra lead social at Google reminds me of President Obama tapping General Petraeus to take on Afghanistan. It feels calming at the moment, but might not actually lead to the desired outcome.

Om Malik puts it this way: Vic is a great product manager, focused on features. But social is more than a veneer of games, gestures, music, comments.

Om Malik, Slide, Vic Gundotra & The Un-Social Reality of Google

Social is more than just features. I’ve been saying for a while that in order to understand social and win over the social web, companies need to understand people. I’m not sure Google is capable of understanding people on that level, and that’s the reason why the company strikes out whenever it tries. There are rumors Google co-founder Sergey Brin championed the acquisition of Slide. He also championed Google Wave (which is shutting down) and the poorly conceived Google Buzz.

We are in a great migration away from a web of pages to a web of flow, where streams connect us and allow us to share links, comments, photos, games, locations, lists, and even larger social objects in the future. And Google has only had the smallest involvement in that expansion.

Google made a pile by harvesting the latent value of all the social gestures we were leaving around the web in the form of links. These form the core of Page Rank and Google’s search/advertising business.

This was born in the paleolithic of the social web, where mostly we were wandering around as hunter-gatherers, turning over rocks, based on keyword search. The idea of social in those days was to send email alerts to people so they’d remember to read your blog and post comments.

But the social web has grown based on social networks — relationships between people — not hyperlinks between web pages. We are in a great migration away from a web of pages to a web of flow, where streams connect us and allow us to share links, comments, photos, games, locations, lists, and even larger social objects in the future. And Google has only had the smallest involvement in that expansion. But they desperately want in on the next wave, but they haven’t found a formula yet. It’s not Wave or Buzz, obviously. And now they are plotting a knockoff of Facebook: how 2009!

There are many unplowed fertile fields out there, where Google’s scale and engineering soul could do great things. As just one example, modern social network research has shown that the social ‘scenes’ we are situated in — the millions of people that form the ‘friends of my friends’ friends’ network — are the single best predictor of our likelihood to be fat, smoke, or be happy. And by extension, buy Chevrolets, listen to Country music, or read manga. And no services have tapped into that reality, yet, except in the most inadvertent ways. (For more background see Social Scenes: The Invisible Calculus Of Culture, It’s Betweenness That Matters, Not Your Eigenvalue: The Dark Matter Of Influence and Jeff Jarvis on The Hunt For The Elusive Influencer.)

This is why actions like buying Slide are likely to be diversions, like Jaiku and Dodgeball turned out to be. Meanwhile, there are real advances to be made — like building sociality into the operating platforms of the future. Obviously Google is in a position to do that with Android and Chrome, but I honestly don’t think they know what to build.

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• Google Buys Slide for $182 Million, Getting More Serious about Social Games (Sarah Lacy/TechCrunch) (techmeme.com)
• Is Google Going to Kill Buzz Next? (thomashawk.com)
• Google Taps Its Main Man In Preparations For War With Facebook Over Social Media (observer.com)

Social Revolution: Mosh and Socialstream

 

I am going to start referring to the release of the Facebook platform model as the Facebook Discontinuity, since it seems like the history of social networking apps will be dated before and after.

Among other things, the FB Discontinuity has forced the vendors of various doggy offerings to accelerate their implicit or explicit plans to kill or drastically revamp sluggard apps.

For example, I recently learned about the Google/Carnegie Mellon SocialStream project [pointer: Search Engine Watch], which sounds like the fusion of meta-network notions with the flow and traffic model (as found in Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, and others).

[from Socialstream]

An Introduction to the Project

Socialstream is the result of a Google-sponsored capstone project in the Master’s program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. This project was guided by three goals that built upon each other:

Initial Task: Rethink and reinvent online social networking

Refined Focus: Discover the user needs related to social networking and explore how a unified social network service can enhance their experience.

Prototype Goal: Create a system for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks.

Directed to help improve the online community orkut, the project’s scope was not to simply redesign the interface. Our team considered how online social networking could bring greater value to users, especially for ages above twenty. After initial brainstorming and research, we chose to focus on the effects of a new model for online social networking: a unified social network that, as a service, provides social data to many other applications. Our user research examined needs related to online as well as offline social networking and considered how they related to a unified social network service model. Through this user research we identified a set of archetypes that represent common behavior patterns that existed across multiple study participants and also formulated a summarized list of their high level needs.

One of the aspects of Socialstream that I applaud is that they are incorporating a buddylist view (a la

Also, the rumor about Yahoo’s Mosh seems to be spreading (mostly courtesy of TechCrunch), which I am trying to clarify with my contacts in Yahoo. This is likely to be the Discontinuity-inspired end of Yahoo 360, which has had a disappointing pageview downturn, as interesting in MySpace and Facebook has risen.

Anyway, more to follow on both fronts as I weasel my way into getting more insight into the technology and business plans behind both Socialstream and Mosh.

Unlinking From Social Networks: Part 2

My project to unlink myself from the dozens or more social networking apps I have registered with is gaining momentum, and a lot of heat. The back channel — where dozens of people have emailed me asking me what the hell I’m up to — has been four or five times as active as the public interchange here at Get Real and over at Operating Manual for Social Tools (a project now closing down).

Questions range from “why are you dropping out of social networks in general and LinkedIn in specific” to statements of support and agreement with my general comments. Here, in a nutshell, are my motivations:

• I have participated in the various public social networks only passively — responding to others requests to connect, and occasionally passing along a request to connect to some contact.
• Because of the investments I have made in existing modes of networking — particularly social media based networks — I have not spent any significant time trying to exploit the SNAs.
• I have had a couple of disquieting interactions with those trying to aggressively promote themselves, their products or services through SNAs, as recounted here and here. I don’t really want to be prey to that sort of predator.
• I have wound up getting dozens of requests each month in the various networks by people more than two degrees away trying to reach people more than two degrees away, where I have little social capital involved, and I uniformally have been turning down those requests. In essence, these are a form of spam, although one that is allowed by the ‘rules of engagement’ surrounding the SNAs.
• I am annoyed that the SNAs don’t provide opt out at every juncture: please don’t involve me in requests like this, please don’t allow this person to contact me. please don’t contact me ever. The services vary widely in this regard. I was able to drop out of LinkedIn within a 24 hour period, although it does require sending a message to customer support.
• And I have an abiding interest in the creation of an interoperable basis for social networks. My experience in the instant messagingworld — where we have several large public networks that do not interact easily — demonstrates the problems inherent in pushing ahead with a fragmented model, where several large players will grow without any obvious incentives for interoperability, although it may well be in the public interest. (See the recent story about SocialPhysics.org, as an alternative.)

I set up a poll at www.votations.com that has just about a 100 respondents. Although my poll is flawed (for example, the first two questions are really the same, stated slightly differently), I am still interested in the results.

• Of the respondents (which are primarily my contacts at LinkedIn), roughly one third are passive users, not initiating activities but just responding to requests from others.
• One third have considered dropping out, because of lack of acitivity or too many requests.
• 75%+ of respondents believe they have been socially spammed (“someone trying to use the SNA in a way that does not line up with my goals or profile”).
• Roughly one third state that SNAs “are lacking critical features” — a lot of missing features — that would make them usable.

There is a sizable group, perhaps even more than half who find SNAs beneficial.
The remainder have serious issues and questions. My read is that these technologies are immature, have a long way to go, and probably have not assumed the form that will in the long run be the ‘killer app’ for SNAs.

My bet is that a deep integration of an open platform for social networking that easily integrates with social media is the best bet for future success. I would appreciate any other pointers to SNA research or development in this area: that’s where I think the missing critical features lie.

I plan to rework the poll, and press on with my retreat from SNAs. Next are ZeroDegrees, Spoke, Orkut, Friendster, Tribe.net, and so on. More to follow.