Google is apparently "getting ready to fully cast its social net over its web properties," according to TechCrunch, the latest signal being the automatic creation of a Google account when opening a YouTube account.
It's a clever, almost Microsoft-esque move designed to make Google the center of our social universe. It can't happen fast enough. But Google shouldn't stop with its own properties.
The social Web is currently a morass of mostly siloed choices. I can be on Facebook but also have to build a profile on LinkedIn, not to mention Digg, Slashdot, Bebo, Classmates.com, etc., etc. While we've seen marginal linkage start to form between these through initiatives such as OpenSocial, they don't get nearly far enough toward the one-stop social experience most of us want on the Web.
Yes, choice is good, so sometimes we assume a dizzying array of choices must be very good. Not so.
As I've argued before (PDF), what we need is not a myriad of choices but rather a limited, manageable set of quality choices. Markets trend toward such choice naturally by eliminating weak players and elevating strong competitors.
This is as it should be.
Fearful as I am of any one vendor controlling my Web experience, as Microsoft did for decades in desktop computing, I'm almost equally fearful of a disjointed Web experience that never really hits its stride because users are hamstrung among different social Web sites.
I want the Web to be just that: a connecting web, not an isolating one.
So, dominate me, Google. You've been a good steward of data and user experience thus far, albeit not without hiccups. Find some way to pull in my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social data to my Google profile. Just ask: I'll give it to you. I have better things to do than waste time schlepping between different social Web sites. Save me the bother.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
(Credit:
Plaxo)
TechCrunch is reporting that Plaxo's Pulse has jumped "an order of magnitude" in adoption (from 200,000 connections to over one million), as Plaxo's VP of Marketing John McCrea notes on his blog.
Lesson learned? According to McCrea, "open" is good for business:
When we launched the beta of Pulse in August, we made a strategic bet -- that the market was ripe for an "open social network" (rather than yet another "walled garden").
... Read more
(Credit:
Hitwise)
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this graph from Hitwise is worth a thousand page views. The graph shows the market share of visits to all OpenSocial members combined versus Facebook. Clearly, Google's OpenSocial is a force to be reckoned with.
The question, however, is just what we're supposed to do with it. Thus far, I can't really understand what I'm supposed to do with Facebook. Google's OpenSocial has brought me no closer to grokking the nirvana that has apparently been unleashed. Jack Schofield in The Guardian gives two good reasons why:
First, as far as I can see, it's just a widget format, i.e. Google Gadgets. I'm sure there is value to having a common Google-sponsored widget format for mini-applications, because it reduces the amount of work needed to put Vampires or whatever on different social-networking sites. But really, who cares?
Second, I can't see what's open about it. Sure anybody can write apps for it, but anybody can write apps for Facebook, or, indeed, Windows. ... Read more
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