Google and the Value of Social Networking (Part 2)

New York Times has another article about Google's efforts to create successful social services. A former Google employee confirms what Aaron Iba and Peter Norvig have previously said: Google didn't understand the value of social networking.

There is some belief at Google that their DNA is not perfectly suited to build social products, and it's a quite controversial topic internally. The part of social that's about stalking people, sharing photos, looking cool — it's mentally foreign to engineers. All those little details are subtle and sometimes missed, especially by technical people who are brought up in a very utilitarian company.

Now that social networks have become very popular, Google realized there's a lot of value in sharing information with your friends. Search results can include web pages recommended by your friends, ads can be better targeted based on your social profile and web apps like Google Latitude or Google Buzz can be more useful.

Eric Schmidt said that Google will add a social layer to its existent services and it won't create a social network like Facebook. Google also acquired start-ups that created apps for social networks (Slide, Jambool). "In a rare move for an outsider, Google has named Max Levchin, former CEO of Slide and cofounder of PayPal, a vice president of engineering," reported VentureBeat two months ago.

Google will have to learn to create social services, but it won't be easy and Google's culture might have to change. Here's what Max Levchin said a few months before becoming Google VP:

For some strange reason, in the last few years, the industry, or the press that covers the industry, has come to glorify failure. I think it's completely wrong. Failure is not good.

For Google, failure is always an option, especially when it comes to social networking.

Google Me: a Social Upgrade, Not a New Service

Eric Schmidt said at the Google Zeitgeist conference that Google will add social features to the existing services, but it won't launch a standalone product to compete with the Facebook.

"We're trying to take the Google's core products and add a social component. If you think about it, it's obvious. With your permission, knowing more about who your friends are, we can provide more tailored recommendations. Search quality can get better. Everybody has convinced themselves that there's some huge project about to get announced in the next week. And I can assure you that's not the case," said Eric Schmidt, according to the MSNBC.

Google's CEO also said that "the best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data. Failing that, there are other ways to get that information."

Wall Street Journal speculates that YouTube is one of the services that will add more social features. For example, you'll be able to see when a video is watched by many of your friends.

Ever since Google Profiles has been launched, back in the 2007, Google added social features to services like Google Maps, Google Reader, iGoogle, but failed to create a compelling interface that integrates all these features. The most important attempt to integrate the Google's social services is Google Buzz and Google should focus on improving Buzz, create a standalone interface for the people that don't use Gmail, adding more privacy features, introducing reciprocal friendship and building a meaningful social graph.

Until Google users can answer the question: "who are my Google friends?", Google will never be able to develop successful social services. Are they the Google Chat buddies, the contacts from the Friends group, the people you follow in the Google Buzz? Google ignored for many years Gmail's contact manager and automatically added entries to the address book when you replied to Gmail messages. The problem was only solved when Google launched a business version of the Gmail and users wanted to sync their contacts. Now Google will have to solve the friendship issue.

Google Me: a Social Upgrade, Not a New Service

Eric Schmidt said at the Google Zeitgeist conference that Google will add social features to the existing services, but it won't launch a standalone product to compete with the Facebook.

"We're trying to take the Google's core products and add a social component. If you think about it, it's obvious. With your permission, knowing more about who your friends are, we can provide more tailored recommendations. Search quality can get better. Everybody has convinced themselves that there's some huge project about to get announced next week. And I can assure you that's not the case," said Eric Schmidt, according to the MSNBC.

Google's CEO also said that "the best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data. Failing that, there are other ways to get that information."

Wall Street Journal speculates that YouTube is one of the services that will add more social features. For example, you'll be able to see when a video is watched by many of your friends.

Ever since Google Profiles has been launched, back in the 2007, Google added social features to the services like Google Maps, Google Reader, iGoogle, but failed to create a compelling interface that integrates all these features. The most important attempt to integrate the Google's social services is Google Buzz and Google should focus on improving Buzz, create a standalone interface for the people that don't use Gmail, adding more privacy features, introducing reciprocal friendship and building a meaningful social graph.

Until Google users can answer the question: "who are my Google friends?", Google will never be able to develop successful social services. Are they the Google Chat buddies, the contacts from the Friends group, the people you follow in Google Buzz? Google ignored for many years Gmail's contact manager and automatically added entries to the address book when you replied to the Gmail messages. The problem was only solved when Google launched a business version of the Gmail and users wanted to sync their contacts. Now Google will have to solve the friendship issue.

Google Buys SocialDeck

Google acquired yet another social gaming company: SocialDeck. The start-up had an interesting idea: creating a platform for playing the games on any device. "SocialDeck was founded in 2008 with the vision of enabling 'anywhere, anytime, anyone' gaming. The company has launched several titles for the iPhone, Facebook, and BlackBerry using its social gaming platform technology, which enables simultaneous game play across multiple mobile devices and social networks," explains Social Deck's site.

It should be obvious that Google doesn't buy companies like SocialDeck to develop games. Most likely, Google wants to create a platform for social gaming that will enable users to play the same game on an Android device, on an iPhone, on a computer, on a Chrome OS tablet, in Google Me or any other social network that uses Google's platform.

Here's an overview of SocialDeck's gaming platform:

Orkut Lets You Communicate with Groups of Friends

Orkut, Google's social network that has a lot of users in the Brazil and India, has received a major update. Groups of friends are more visible and you can send messages to the members of a group directly from the Orkut's homepage. Orkut also updated search results pages and the application pages, while testing a new platform for the communities.

There are a lot of changes and it will be interesting to see if the Google tests these features in the Orkut before launching the Google Me, a social network that will compete with Facebook.

One of the major changes in Orkut is the focus on groups. "You love your grandma and you're friends with your boss, but that doesn't mean you want them both seeing the conversation you're having with your friends the day after a party. With orkut, you can now build separate groups of your friends reflecting how you to interact with them in real life." This is one of the ideas from "The Real Life Social Network", a presentation by Paul Adams, Senior User Experience Researcher at the Google.

Google's Rahul Kulkarni mentioned last year that Orkut will change a lot. "The new Orkut adopts the latest Google Web Toolkit platform and includes features such as built-in simultaneous chat, photo tagging with the automatic face detection and private sharing of photo albums including the new safety features. This is the beginning of a new direction for Orkut, where users will be able to increasingly share and communicate with groups of friends from their lives."

Google Buys Slide

Google announced that it has acquired the Slide, a start-up that develops the social apps. TechCrunch reports that Google paid $228 million for the Slide, after investing in Zynga, one of Slide's competitors.

"For Google, the web is about people, and we're working to develop the open, transparent and interesting (and fun!) ways to allow our users to take the full advantage of how technology can bring them closer to the friends and family and provide useful information just for them. Slide has already created compelling social experiences for tens of millions of the people across many platforms, and we've already built strong social elements into products like Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Picasa and YouTube. As the Slide team joins Google, we'll be investing even more to make Google services socially aware and expand these capabilities for our users across the web."

It's obvious that Google plans to launch a social service to then compete with Facebook, but it's not clear why it would buy a company that develops apps like SuperPoke, SuperPoke Pets or FunSpace. Maybe for Slide's engineering talent, Slide's valuable analytics data or maybe because it couldn't buy the Zynga.

Social networks and online games account for about 33% of the time spent online in the US, according to a Nielsen study. Tom Chatfield, the author of the Fun Inc: Why Games Are The 21st Century's Most Serious Business, thinks that social games aren't a fad: "People realised that a social platform like that Facebook gives people ways to show off to, or compete with, their friends. It's so much more engaging to do something with people you know than to do it with the strangers. You can cheat if you're playing online with strangers, but playing with the friends is an incentive to be fair, and that brings the emotional rewards of the competition."

Since Facebook has the Internet's main social graph and stores data about more than 500 million users, all the cool social apps integrate with the Facebook. In the future, every web application will have a social component, which will probably powered by Facebook, a closed social network that traps user data.

OpenSocial is a Google project whose goal was to create the social apps that work in any social network. FriendConnect was designed to transform any site in an OpenSocial container. Buzz is the epitome of openness, by embracing open standards and allowing anyone to access the firehose, which includes public activity from every Buzz user. Unfortunately, these projects haven't been very successful, so Google will have to build a social network on top of OpenSocial, Google Buzz and Google Profiles. The project is crucial for the future of Google search, Google ads, Google's web apps and maybe more than that.

Peter Norvig says in an interview that Google's biggest mistake was ignoring social networking.

"I can't speak for the whole company, but I guess not embracing the social aspects [was Google's biggest mistakes]. Facebook came along and has been very successful, and I may have dismissed that early on. There was this initial feeling of, 'Well, this is about real, valid information, and Facebook is more about celebrity gossip or something.' I think I missed the fact that there is real importance to having a social network and getting these recommendations from the friends. I might have been too focused on getting the facts and figures—to answer a query such as 'What digital camera should I buy?' with the best reviews and facts, when some people might prefer to know 'Oh, my friend Sally got that one; I'll just get the same thing.' Maybe something isn't the right answer just because your friends like it, but there is something useful there, and that's a factor we have to weigh in along with the others."