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Dec. 8th, 2006 02:11 pmI can't really guess at how many social networking sites I've signed up to over the years. I was thinking about this a bit as I noticed some more LinkedIn mail. It's a site that seemed interesting, until I realised that I don't need to pay another company for the privilege of asking friends to introduce me to their friends. But I was thinking through the bits of electronic interaction that I have, and thinking back to my days at Hollinger where we actively spent time thinking about what content we could provide that would keep the user moving from one of our sites to another of our sites, always looking at our ads.
With this lens on, I was thinking about where I would take Google next if I were in a similar position there. I think that Google's future probably relies primarily on their crappiest product: Orkut. What places like MySpace do well is provide what I think of as the old CompuServe experience. You go, and in one spot you have different forums, chat, and downloads.
But what if Google were to make Orkut not suck? They've already started integrating Talk into it (although it still doesn't work with Apps for Your Domain), and I can only imagine that we'll soon see your account only a short while from where your Orkut page shows your public blog entries, as well as allows you to post to your own blog, or a community one. The relationships there are rich enough with Friends Groups and a gradient of friendship that the community FOAF bits could be represented easily. Picassa and their page builder things would allow people to setup myspace-like places for themselves without ever leaving the familiar framework of Orkut. Business could use all of these tools for internal corporate things, marking certain items as publish while the integrated checkout functionality let them to business quickly and efficiently.
But what other interactions then? Could we book a doctor's appointment by looking at their Calendar through their corporate page? Easily book venues for the band with the same? Use the presence notification in Talk figure out if there's someone I can deal with right now to finalise the plans for the upcoming gig?
And the cool part is that from what Google's done so far, they'll cheerfully let you integrate your own product into theirs through some sort of open standard.
With this lens on, I was thinking about where I would take Google next if I were in a similar position there. I think that Google's future probably relies primarily on their crappiest product: Orkut. What places like MySpace do well is provide what I think of as the old CompuServe experience. You go, and in one spot you have different forums, chat, and downloads.
But what if Google were to make Orkut not suck? They've already started integrating Talk into it (although it still doesn't work with Apps for Your Domain), and I can only imagine that we'll soon see your account only a short while from where your Orkut page shows your public blog entries, as well as allows you to post to your own blog, or a community one. The relationships there are rich enough with Friends Groups and a gradient of friendship that the community FOAF bits could be represented easily. Picassa and their page builder things would allow people to setup myspace-like places for themselves without ever leaving the familiar framework of Orkut. Business could use all of these tools for internal corporate things, marking certain items as publish while the integrated checkout functionality let them to business quickly and efficiently.
But what other interactions then? Could we book a doctor's appointment by looking at their Calendar through their corporate page? Easily book venues for the band with the same? Use the presence notification in Talk figure out if there's someone I can deal with right now to finalise the plans for the upcoming gig?
And the cool part is that from what Google's done so far, they'll cheerfully let you integrate your own product into theirs through some sort of open standard.
