Via Techcrunch’s Erich Schonfeld, Google appears to be moving towards turning iGoogle into its own social network. As Google is notoriously ham-fisted in this space, I worry that a move to appease a VP may undermine the well-executed and popular iGoogle product.
Before you write this off as another Google rant, lets step back for a second. Google, for all its success, is constrained in the social space by a unique problem: its success. There is no entity more central on the web, and as a result of that, Google touches almost all of us. You might think this makes for the ultimate social opportunity, but experience teaches us differently.
On the web, our favorite social spaces are cultivated. We enter new social places with expectations of social interaction, understanding that we’ll have to build a network. We “train” – learning the network with a small cluster of trusted friends, and as norms evolve and culture sets, we expand and integrate into the network. This is a critical learning process, one that can’t be taught after the fact.
Google faces two problems socializing their properties. First, Google owns enormous contact lists. Google has our emails, our hyperlinks, our readers, our clickstreams: they know who we’re close to more than anyone else. Therefore, they’re uniquely able to pre-populate our contact lists and incite sociality. Of course, pre-populated contact lists are the death of meaningful social experience, but that will be a hard sell to a VP sitting on petabytes of mined social network data. This echoes my critique of the ideology of “social network portability”.
Second, we’ve established boundaries with Google properties. While Google knows that Gmail and Search and Reader are all the same thing, we don’t. These products aren’t social; when our friends are revealed and behavior shared, this will change how we feel about these products. Identical to Facebook’s Beacon, Google faces a terrible tradeoff in unifying users across properties; while the move will provide fuel for the social experience, it will also drastically change our sense of boundaries and privacy in Google properties.
At present, Google has only rolled out built-in networking in development mode; this is a wise choice. They must now decide what they want from their efforts. If they want real sociality, they must make a hard decision to only provide tools and let the networks grow organically. If they simply want to introduce social features for publicity, they stand to poison a key product.
Tags: google, social networks
I agree that a SNS can’t be bootstrapped, but maybe it can be brute-forced. You say “If they simply want to introduce social features for publicity, they stand to poison a key product” and that’d be right if iGoogle were a standalone product – as most people think it is. But as you also point out, it isn’t. Google knows us better than we know ourselves, in terms of our online identities. I ultimately don’t think they will do so, but there’s really nothing stopping them from rolling out an automatically-populated SNS via a “Yes/No” radio button the next time every Google[Product] user logs in. The only question is, why do it? They already have a massive portion of the personal information of the largest social network out there – the Internet.
Why do this? Because it makes Google part of the social app ecosystem. Given the walled-garden tendencies in that area, it makes sense for them to provide an alternative platform. Isnt this why they started OpenSocial in the first place?
I already use iGoogle as my primary activity dashboard, mostly through RSS feeds. Integrating the OpenSocial platform just makes this easier for developers.
Not sure I understand your comment, “Of course, pre-populated contact lists are the death of meaningful social experience”
When I enter a new room, I would love to know first who I am closest in association too. Then from there use that a foundation with which to expand out from.
I’m not sure if I would call it “bootstrapping”. To me that term refers to quickly getting something off the ground, using any means possible, and probably in a startup environment.
I actually do think SNS’s can be bootstrapped – not Facebook, but a very dumbed down one at least.
Google has already started with a small migration like that – it’s in your Google Reader contacts, (Friends shared items). That’s your contact list being portable right there. Naturally it’s only Google addresses at the moment, but I don’t think users have been very against opening that up.
“Not sure I understand your comment, “Of course, pre-populated contact lists are the death of meaningful social experience”"
I think what Fred is saying is that a fully-filled-out contact list – by circumventing the (re)discovery period of early, exciting activity in a mediated social context, takes away one of the most pleasurable aspects of the medium. I happen to agree – how much fun is Facebook now, or was Friendster circa 2005, etc. It’s the finding that’s entertaining – but it’s also the finding that helps you redefine your social context as you go through life and different circumstances. Especially for young people, a pre-populated SNS contact list including people you used to talk with three years ago might be exactly the wrong social context to recreate.
Uno and Tom – JKD nails bootstrapping in comment 5. I am talking about the very real possbility Google will simply turn on social with iGoogle. Look how they did it with Reader?
The problem is (as with all things social), contextual. Google can take my contact lists (my Gmail connections, etc) and bootstrap a rich network immediately. But sharing my “google experience” isn’t the context I have with these people. I will need to establish this context first, before I start sharing.
And to Jackson, as always I can’t disagree with you. Great points, and lets hope that Google makes the right decisions on this leap forward.
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