Google CEO Confirms Social Integration

siliconbits writes "As we get closer to — and hear more about — the launch of Google's upcoming social product, Google Me, the less and less it seems like a stand-alone social network and more like an interweaving of social connections into its existing offerings. It sounds eerily similar to those 'social' search results that have lingered at the bottom of the results page and third-party extras like Rapportive, the Gmail add-on that gives you the social networking lowdown on your email contacts."

Comments

Uh, no thanks.

[GrumblyStuff]

Is there ANY place that isn't jumping on the god damn social networking bandwagon?

Re:Uh, no thanks.

[cybrthng]

Maybe the Internet was social to begin with?

I don't like the way its being dominated by single entities acting as marketing companies, but i'm not naive enough to think it isn't a fundamental aspect of the very existence of the Internet :)

Re:Uh, no thanks.

[bsDaemon]

It's a fundamental aspect of human culture and psychology... for normal people, at least. Its just there used to be places you could go that everyone in the world couldn't follow you and find out everything you were doing.

Re:Uh, no thanks.

[eln]

The internet was designed to keep computers connected during a nuclear war.

That's a common, but untrue, myth. The Internet was designed to survive large network outages primarily because the early networks were extremely unreliable, not because of any desire to survive nuclear attack. The Internet was primarily designed, and used, for facilitating communication between researchers in far-flung locations. In that aspect, it could be argued that the intention was social in nature from the very beginning, and anonymity wasn't ever really expected or designed for.

Having said that, the explosion of popularity of the Internet caused anonymity to become a highly prized side effect of the nature of the network, and many things that exist on the Internet today (for better or worse) might not exist without the ability to effectively hide one's true identity. These days the trend is heading back toward using real identities, which wouldn't necessarily be so alarming if it wasn't for the huge increase in the capabilities of data mining.

Back in the day, you could use your real name everywhere and people still wouldn't necessarily know all that much about you. Now, companies are able to gather and share enormous amounts of information about you through their ability to store and process massive amounts of information, something that was simply not possible as recently as 10 years ago. Couple this with the social networking scene that actively encourages people to share ever more information on (intentionally) poorly secured networks run by companies whose entire business model revolves around gleaning useful information from all that data, and it's not hard to imagine a future where everyone is able to instantly find out everything about everyone else. For those of us who still value our privacy, this is a troubling development.

Re:Mixed Feelings

[Rogerborg]

What, you mean scam a shitload of funding for a vapourware product, and then go strangely silent? Google already have a shitload of money.

Re:There still are

[Requiem18th]

Fair enough, but you have to admit that things start getting sticky when Google tries to pressure you into giving them your cellphone number by using SMS for authentication.

Sure they may already have a rough idea of where I live based on my IP address, heck they may know exactly where I live thanks to the Google maps van that also happened to sniff and store WiFi activity.

They still don't know whether I go to Pizza-Hut or not and they are irritatingly desperate to find out.

Re:Why do they term beta programs "Product Launch"

[DragonWriter]

Their attention span seems notoriously short at times.

That's actually quite deliberate, as far as I can tell. Google's model is to get something working in front of real users quickly, have it adapt quickly, and, if it doesn't work well enough to be worth the costs of keeping it up, kill it. This lets them get lots of things in front of customers, giving them more chances to get hits (and letting them learn a lot from the flops.)

It also reduces the risks, since things they don't keep plugging on things till they are "done" before finding out that they need to be killed.

(This, of course, doesn't include things that are done, or nearly so, that they buy, but that's a different part of the model entirely.)