google social networks, Google Social Media Networking Google Friends Connect
Google already has a social network (orkut), but it's only popular in Brazil and India, it doesn't have a Googley interface and it had a lot of security problems in the past. That's why last year Google sponsored a project at the Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute whose initial goal was to "rethink and reinvent online social networking".
"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."
The network, titled Socialstream, is able to "draw content from a variety of sources. Socialstream would be based on a unified social network (USN), a single network that provides social data to other sites as a service. A service model allows many social networks to be linked together, letting them share both content and the nature of the relationships of the people who use them."
This core feature will allow you to have accounts on more social networks, but centralize the information about your contacts in a single place. This also assumes that other social networks have an API and don't act like walled gardens, which is not the case right now. Socialstream used data from blogging and photo-sharing sites like Blogger, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums.
"Socialstream emphasizes improving social connections by making it more efficient to communicate with, share with, and view the social content of all the people in a user's online social network. Socialstream provides a compelling user experience because it aggregates content across many different networks so a user has a single location to discover new content and communicate. The goal of Socialstream is to present social information in a way that ties it to the person who posted the information, and not the site from which it came."
Like with any feed reader, you'll be informed when there's new data for a contact. The site also includes a Google Talk-like sidebar with all your contacts. "The contact list is a structured method of viewing updates, so if a user is interested in a particular person they can navigate directly."
When you create new content, you can post it to Socialstream or to any other participating social network. "Socialstream lowers barriers to sharing with different levels of sharing. Posts can be marked as favorites, and users can read their friends' favorites as a way to keep up with them. 'Post about' supports the idea of post conversations and trackbacks. Posts can also be sent directly to a contact or commented on."
It will be interesting to see if this project ever becomes orkut 2.0, a unified social network that makes it easy for people to keep in touch, no matter if they use Blogger, Wordpress, LiveJournal, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa Web, YouTube, MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Bebo or other social network.
Google tip-toed into the hot market of online social networks with the quiet launch of Orkut.com on Thursday.
The search company, which is expected to go public this year, is flexing its power with its Internet fans by constantly offering new services, including comparison shopping and news search. Orkut could be the clearest signal that Google's aspirations don't end with search.
"Orkut is an online trusted community Web site designed for friends. The main goal of our service is to make the social life of yourself and your friends more active and stimulating," according to the Web site, which states that the service is "in affiliation with Google."
A Google representative said that the site is the independent project of one of its engineers, Orkut Buyukkokten, who works on user interface design for Google. Buyukkokten, a computer science doctoral candidate at Stanford University before joining Google, created Orkut.com in the past several months by working on it about one day a week--an amount that Google asks all of its engineers to devote to personal projects. Buyukkokten, with the help of a few other engineers, developed Orkut out of his passion for social networking services.
Google spokeswoman Eileen Rodriguez said that despite Orkut's affiliation, the service is not part of Google's product portfolio at this time. "We're always looking at opportunities to expand our search products, but we currently have no plans in the social networking market."
Still, Google owns the technology developed by its employees, Rodriguez said.
Orkut is a "trusted" social network, meaning that you must be invited to join. The service sent out thousands of invitations Thursday to welcome individuals, according to Google.
Google regularly throws out new products and services to see if they stick. Google News, for example, began as the personal project of Google engineer Krishna Bharat in 2002. While Google still runs news search in "beta" form, it is gaining a wide audience on the Internet and is prominently promoted on Google's home page.
Orkut, if adopted into the Google family, would signal a dramatic shift in the company's direction, similar to its acquisition of Pyra Labs and Blogger, a tool for self-publishing to the Internet. The goal of a social networking service is a far cry from Google's long-stated mission of organizing the world's information. Instead of helping connect people to information on the Web, it would be helping people connect with other people.
It also once again raises the notion that Google aspires to become a portal like Yahoo, something that the company has long denied. Google already helps people shop, read news, thwart pop-up advertisements, get stock information and publish to the Web. With a social networking component, at the very least, it would likely feed investor demand for a public offering because of its diversified assets, financial analysts say. Investors expect Google to go public sometime in the spring.
Social networking sites like Friendster and Meetup.com are attracting fevered attention from Silicon Valley celebrities. Tim Koogle, Yahoo co-founder and its former chief executive officer, recently joined the board of Friendster and invested more than $1 million, along with former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel and Google board member Ram Shriram. Venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital have already invested $10 million in the site.
eBay founder Pierre Omidyar also recently invested several million dollars and joined the board of directors of Meetup.com, a networking site that fosters offline meetings between interest groups and is fueling political organizing for presidential hopefuls Howard Dean and John Kerry. The Evite invitation service has moved to compete with Friendster, too.
Google itself has offered to buy Friendster, according to sources. Google declined to comment on rumors.
Still, the attention is inspiring me-too efforts by Internet mainstays. Personals service Match.com is planning to enter the market, Piper Jaffray senior analyst Safa Rashtchy said. Yahoo is a likely candidate, too, for creating a social networking service on top of its Yahoo Groups service, Rashtchy said.
"I'd be surprised if Yahoo's not thinking about this already," he said.
The allure is in hosting a never-ending party of online connections, and eventually inspiring people to pay for it. Social networks are increasingly inciting people to spend hours online with their sites. Friendster, for example, had roughly 1 million people spend an average of 35 minutes on its site in November, according to figures from Nielsen/NetRatings, a market researcher. That amount bested time spent with Yahoo Groups, which was about 29 minutes.
Even though social networks have drawn interest from Web surfers and investors, the business model to sustain them has not been proven yet. Sponsored search listings are Google's primary means for making money, and although such text ads are peppered throughout sites like Friendster, people click on ads more often when they are searching for something.
One trend that could affect the market opportunity for social networking sites is consumers' growing willingness to pay for online services such as dating. Yet it's uncertain that online networking will prove indispensable in that regard.
For Buyukkokten at least, social engineering is a passion and the evolution of similar projects. He created two social networking sites--Clubnexus and Incircle--while at Stanford to help students stay connected. "The spirit of Orkut speaks to what engineers are capable of doing here at Google in that 20 percent of time," Rodriguez said.
CNET News.com's Jim Hu contributed to this report.
Update | 2:06 a.m. Edited to include a reference to Orkut.
Google wants to conquer the social networking world without creating an explicit social network.
Rather than trying to revive its Orkut networking site, which has been a flop outside of Brazil, Google is weaving the various components of social networks through its existing services. Your contacts in Gmail and Google Talk, for example, are being turned into a list of “friends” with whom you can share photos from Picasa or blog posts from Blogger.
Another piece of Google’s decentralized social network is an option that lets people create a profile page with photos and the usual tidbits about where you went to school and so on.
On Tuesday, Google began a campaign to get people to create these profiles, using its biggest gun: the Google search engine. If you want to control what people see when they search for your name, create a profile and click the box to have it included in Google search results.
While some people may well want to do anything they can to hide from the prying eyes of surfers around the world, many more in this narcissistic era will want to ascend to the stage Google is offering them.
There are good write-ups of the nuances of this feature from Danny Sullivan, of Search Engine Land, and John Battelle, the author and ad-network entrepreneur.
Are the new profile pages enough to get Google’s ersatz social network to rival Facebook and MySpace? I don’t know. But it doesn’t hurt.
As much Google’s strategy makes a lot of business sense, I think it has some real problems for users. Social networks are not just software with features they are –really—communities. What you do on MySpace, Twitter and Facebook are different because each has different rules about who can see what about you and different norms that have evolved for what is acceptable behavior.
Facebook, for all its missteps, has really defined a high standard of control for users. It’s easy to change which group of people sees what information about you. And you can see how this plays out. Google lets you have a little control over who sees your phone number and other contact information. Otherwise, everything in the profile is public.
More troublesome to me is that the rules and norms of all of Google’s features are hard to figure out. That is in keeping with the company’s style. It evolves products over time, and tends to offer limited options hoping that default settings work for most people.
That may be the best way to make a search engine, map site and maybe even an e-mail service. But I don’t think it’s the best way to create services where people share sometimes very intimate details about themselves.
For me, I don’t really want strangers to see pictures of my kids. But I love to show pictures of my kids to my friends. Maybe Google lets me do this, but the interface is too hard for me to figure out. I also find Google’s version of the social graph Google Friend Connect inscrutable.
I think Google has a huge set of advantages in becoming a hub of social communications and media sharing, with YouTube, Blogger, Gmail and of course its search engine. But the company and its users may well be served by bringing all these features into a more coherent interface around which user expectations can be built.
When it comes to your personal thoughts, contact information and your photos — be they of your kids or your bachelor party — saying trust the black box just isn’t good enough.
The web is better when it's social
The web is more interesting when you can build apps that easily interact with your friends and colleagues. But with the trend
towards more social applications also comes a growing list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn.
OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML,
developers can create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds.
On this site you'll find information about how you can run your OpenSocial apps in Google products like iGoogle and orkut. For general docs on OpenSocial, check out the community wiki and the official site at opensocial.org.
Many sites, one API
A common API means you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by a broad set of
members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the API and host 3rd party
social applications. There are many websites that support OpenSocial, including hi5,
LinkedIn, MySpace, Netlog, Ning, orkut, and Yahoo! Check out the full list of OpenSocial containers.
Previewing Google Friend Connect: Website owners can make any site social
Easily insert social features to make "any app, any site, any friends" a reality
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (May 12, 2008) – Tonight at Campfire One at the Googleplex (http://code.google.com/campfire/), Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) will announce a preview release of Google Friend Connect, a service that helps website owners grow traffic by enabling any site on the web to easily provide social features for its visitors.
Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social -- and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening's Campfire One), any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming -- picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.
Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.
To illustrate, independent musician Ingrid Michaelson has added music features from iLike with Google Friend Connect and is now able to run the iLike OpenSocial application on her official website (www.ingridmichaelson.com). As a result, starting tonight, fans who visit Ingrid's site can connect with their friends without having to leave the site. Visitors will be able to see comments by friends from their social networks, add music to their profiles, see who is attending concerts, and enjoy other features of the iLike application, all at Ingrid's website. With Google Friend Connect, people will be able to enjoy their favorite features with their friends on any website across the web.
"We want to bring ourselves to every eyeball, not bring every eyeball to us," said Hadi Partovi, President of iLike. "Friend Connect is a significant opportunity for iLike, artists, and fans. The iLike Artist Dashboard™ will be the first content-management system that allows artists not only to post their songs, concerts, and videos to every leading social network from one dashboard, but also to simultaneously manage the content on their own websites."
Google Friend Connect has been developed to lower two barriers to the spread of social features across the web. First, many website owners want to add features that enable their visitors to do things with their friends, but the technology and resource hurdles have been too high. Second, people are tiring of needing to create new logins and profiles and recreate their friends lists wherever they go on the web. Google Friend Connect offers a solution to both these issues.
"Google Friend Connect is about helping the 'long tail' of sites become more social," said David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google. "Many sites aren't explicitly social and don't necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there's an emerging wave of social standards -- OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making 'any app, any site, any friends' a reality."
For Site Owners: Traffic and User Engagement
Without requiring coding experience, Google Friend Connect gives site owners a way to attract and engage more people by giving visitors a way to connect with friends on their websites.
- Drive traffic: people who discover interesting sites can bring their friends with them, and can opt-in to publish their activities on those sites back into their social network, attracting even more visitors.
- Increase engagement: access to friends and OpenSocial applications provides more interesting content and richer social experiences.
- Less work: any site can have social components without hiring a programming team or becoming a social network.
Google Friend Connect is in a preview release, available tonight after Campfire One on a handful of whitelisted websites. All site owners interested in learning more about Google Friend Connect and signing up for the wait list can visit http://www.google.com/friendconnect/ starting tonight. In the weeks ahead we will be turning on more sites, adding more social applications, and integrating feedback from site owners and developers.
Google I/O
Learn more about Google Friend Connect, OpenSocial, and other social initiatives at Google I/O, a two-day developer gathering about building the next generation of web applications. It takes place May 28-29 at Moscone West, San Francisco. Register now for Google I/O at http://code.google.com/events/io/.
Conference Call Information
Google will host a conference call to discuss this announcement. The conference call will be held on Monday, May 12, 2008 at 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time (12:30 p.m. Eastern Time). To access the conference call, please dial +1 (800) 776-0087 within the United States and +1 (913) 312-1509 from international locations. Replays of both calls will be available until midnight Eastern Time, May 19, 2008 at +1 (888) 203-1112 domestically and +1 (719) 457-0820 internationally. The confirmation code for the replay of the call is 7571843.
About Google Inc.
Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.
Media Contact:
Sean Carlson
Google
+1 650 253 1173
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Reflections on social media networking and marketing
With Bitstrips you don't need to be able to draw to create your own comics. Alas, that's still no guarantee that you'll write something clever.
These days everyone seems to be talking about social
networking and/or social
media marketing. Until fairly recently these were topics for tech
nerds and Web marketers, but now more and more people are wondering how they
can use Facebook to
market their programs or products, or how Twitter can
be leveraged as a tool for campus communication. I don't have an immediate
answer to such questions, but I thought this would be a good time to reflect
a bit on what I've learned about social media.
Online social media marketing and networking aren't really that new. People
have been connecting via blogs for several years now, and even before the World
Wide Web, people were connecting on Usenet News, listservs or other services.
What's new is the array of social/Web 2.0 tools now available to us. Today
we have services available that will allow us to make "friends" online with
whom we can:
- share and organize our bookmarks via services such as de.licio.us or ma.gnolia,
- send short messages via Twitter or generate
discussions and share files and links via Pownce,
- recommend articles and sites on Digg, StumbleUpon or
reddit,
- network with like-minded souls and share best practices through topically
centered networks, such as University Web
Developers on Ning,
- compare music tastes on last.fm or book
suggestions on goodreads,
- archive, share and discuss photos on Flickr and Zooomr,
- share personal information, promote bands, products or services on MySpace,
publish status updates, join groups and become zombies on Facebook,
- ponder intellectually meaty issues on Big
Think,
- connect with fellow bloggers on MyBlogLog and
find out which bloggers are linking to your blog on Technorati,
and even
- create cartoons on Bitstrips.
These are but a fraction of the options available in the social media world
of Web 2.0. From the descriptions alone, it is easy to see how many of these
could play into our marketing strategies. After all, what organization wouldn't
want its public sites being shared online?
Social media marketing: online word-of-mouth
Whether people are buying a new
shampoo or deciding on a doctoral program in biomedical
engineering, they
will weigh the opinions of friends and colleagues more heavily than the brochure
they received in the mail. This doesn't mean that we no longer need brochures,
just that online word-of-mouth and viral marketing can often serve to enhance
our other marketing strategies.
Of course the trick with this is the same as it always has been; word-of-mouth
referrals are driven by satisfied customers, not marketers. We can pave the
way and create opportunities to make this happen more easily, but we can't
put words in people's mouths or on their social networks.
For example, I can't just go digging
cool news stories from Case Western Reserve and expect everyone to follow
suit unless I develop a reputation for digging worthwhile reading material.
To do that I have to become a more active member of the digg community where
I make connections, digg the recommendations of others and recommend
pages that I think my followers will like. That sort of activity takes more
time than most of us have (including me—one does need to sleep after
all) and for
many organizations spending time on such activities is just not cost effective.
If marketing is the only reason you are considering social media, then it
may not work out unless you've got the resources to implement it and a product
or service that people like to talk about. But if networking is your goal,
then you may get some marketing benefits as a by-product of your other activities.
If you're a faculty member making connections with peers in your field via
Facebook, sharing sites on de.licio.us or Stumbling your colleague's research
articles you could find your peers reciprocate by sharing links to your articles,
blogs or Web sites as well. This isn't a matter of quid pro quo, it's more
like link karma. Those who respect your work will link to you as you do for
them. It happens on social networks just as it does via phone calls or e-mails.
As a result you could soon discover that your sites are getting more traffic,
your articles are reaching a wider audience and you're meeting more peers
with whom you can share best practices on polymer research, collaborate on
a cognitive science study, discuss new insights into Proust, or whatever else
may be of interest.
Marketing impact of my social media activity
Last July when I wrote Web
2.0 & Social Networking can enhance "findability", I was just beginning
to experiment more actively with social media. I was already blogging, commenting
on other blogs, sharing photos on Flickr and tracking blog reactions on Technorati.
I just wasn't doing it proactively. Since then I've joined more networks
and spent many a night online connecting with Web developers, designers,
bloggers, marketers and other like-minded souls all over the world. I started
this primarily to learn more about social media. I kept with it because I
made some great friends who shared some great ideas and sites. And somehow,
in the process, readership of this blog increased substantially.
Between July and December of 2007 subscribers to the blog (those reading
via RSS feed) increased by 55%. Unique visitors to the site, # of visits
and page views each increased by more than 200%. While readership
has risen steadily since I started the blog in 2005, this was
a noticeable upturn.
If I'd set out on my experiment with only a marketing goal in mind, I don't
know that it would have worked out so well. As I've since discovered the
key is in making connections—which can only be done by becoming a participating
member of whatever community you join. But if you find a community of interest,
whether pertaining to your research, work or hobbies, there are many
benefits to be had.
Social Media Resources
The following articles related to this topic weren't found through Google;
they were either written or recommended by people I've met through social networking.
- Cultural Voyeurism and Social Media
- Recruiting through social networks
- Social Media is About Sociology Not Technology
- Social Media Marketing & Optimization
- Social Survey: Del.icio.us
- Social Survey: StumbleUpon
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