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.

[AnonymousClown]

No. The internet was designed to keep computers connected during a nuclear war. Everything else was added on later. The web was really for publishing documents and accessing scientific information - it wasn't meant to let everyone know that you're a Justin Bieber fan.

But hey, everything morphs and now the scientists can look at porn while surfing for the latest on particle physics.

Re:Uh, no thanks.

[bsDaemon]

Maybe they're just trying to find out what happens when two bodies with strong attractive properties collide with each other?

Re:Uh, no thanks.

[daedae]

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.

The Internet is not and was not necessarily that place ("On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog" notwithstanding). The reason everybody can follow you and find out everything you're doing everywhere else in the world is because you announced to everybody where you were going and what you were doing anyway.

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.

Best two google stories

[rotide]

Best two Google stories, back to back. Spying on kids by Google employee(s) and Social Integration announcements. What could possibly go wrong? Just kind of funny.

Why do they term beta programs "Product Launch"?

[Assmasher]

Fully expect this to be in beta for 2 years and then canceled, a la Wave, for some other 'uber' replacement 'product.' Seriously, with so many talented people, Google actually produces relatively very little.

But the real question

[sfraggle]

The question everyone is asking: Will Google Me be as successful as Windows Me?

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

[jDeepbeep]

Their attention span seems notoriously short at times.

Mixed Feelings

[whisper_jeff]

As much as I want a Facebook killer to come along (and I really, really, really want Facebook to be killed...), I'm not sure I want it to be Google. My big beef with Facebook is I absolutely do not trust them. They've proven to have no respect for my personal information and thus I've pared my profile down to just the bare minimum information and I use the site to stay in touch with friends and family now. I'm not really using the site to keep my friends and family updated on my going-ons, however, because I don't trust Facebook with that information any more. Google, a company which is built on making money from the activities of web browsers, I trust only a bit more. Google, I know, will try to turn a profit from my information but I at least trust Google to make a serious attempt to respect my privacy while they try to monetize my information.

I really want Facebook erased from the digital landscape but I'm not sure if I want Google to be the vanquisher...

Re:Mixed Feelings

[Evil Shabazz]

I don't so much want a Facebook killer, as that just means the sheep have moved on to the next advertising grazing field... I'd much rather people get back to actual social interaction instead of this social facade for the lazy and uninteresting. Instead of facilitating social interaction, Facebook "replaces" it for a large number of people. People get so used to these internet social norms that they don't know how to interact with each other in real life anymore.

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.

Facebook will be dead in 3 years

[tekrat]

And replaced by something else. In the meantime, Google is jealous that they got a movie made about Facebook, but nobody's rushing to make a movie about Google. Even Apple and Microsoft have have movies 9TV movies anyhow) made about them, so they are feeling left out.

In the mantime, this whole "social networking" thing will die out in about 3 years, that's the general timeframe before everyone gets bored and moves on to something else. I mean, how many time can you post a picture of your cat?

Blogs are already dying out because they oversaturated themselves, it should take Facebook about that much time to oversaturate themselves as well. eBay is dying also as everyone now hates them, Google is now viewed as "evil", let's face it, things change fast in web-time, the WWW has only been around for slightly less than 2 decades (publicly), and one of the first sites here was Yahoo. Does Yahoo make the news every day? No. Nobody gives a crap about Yahoo. They are a dull company. And so it will go with every other internet firm.

There still are

[SmallFurryCreature]

I can't follow you outside slashdot unless YOU make that possible. I don't know who you are. I can search your posts by your username because YOU choose to create an account and post under that account. I can't see what posts you made as an AC. Or what moderations you have done.

All your actions outside posts made under your account are unknown to me, unless YOU somehow share them AND link them to this account. You could be Obama for all I know, or be Lady Gaga. Now, I could google your nickname, but that only works if you used the same nick somewhere else.

It is possible to analyse all your posts and from them deduce a profile based on your style of writing. To be fair for the average slashdot poster that would put their location as "nearest kindergarden" but it might be possible to trace you to a specific location.

BUT that is because YOU choose to link all your posts together.

On the other hand, in the real world, I can't go invisible when I leave my house. So my neighbours know when I come and when I go. The supermarket can tell what I am doing by what I am buying. The bookshop knows my reading habbits (you sicko, is their personalized greeting) etc etc.

So, why do people worry about their online visibitlity where you can be a million different people, when everyone and their dog knows your offline person and what it is doing?

If you ever lived in a small community, you are used to it and you know, if the community is good, then it is a benefit. Neighbours actually stopped an attempted burglary because they knew I was away and saw movement so knew it couldn't be okay when I was younger and lived in a "village" that was about a dozen houses. In Amsterdam I had a neighbour discovered after the smell from the rotting corpse finally drifted into the hallway. All I knew was that the previous resident had moved and nobody ever noticed the new person moving in.

Don't complain about invasion of privacy is you broadcast every fart you make to the entire world. It is like saying "how dare people look at me when I streak down the high street".

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"

[geekoid]

Just like gmail, and gtalk, and search, earth, maps, .. oh wait.

Her is an idea, stop using fallacious arguments.

Your argument is basically this:

Hey, a few of there products where accepted to market, there fore every thing they ever do will fail.

I, for one, am glad they do this type of RnD research.

Part of research is failure. An idea that just doesn't work when implemented.

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.)