(no subject)

[jbailey]

I 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.

Comments

[sfllaw.livejournal.com]

I am unconvinced that Orkut can beat out MySpace or Facebook for social networking, much less LinkedIn.

The only thing for Google to do now is to make its social networking software completely transparent. So you can't tell the difference between reading your e-mail and networking with your friends.

[jbailey.livejournal.com]

I don't mean it in the sense of beating out MySpace or LinkedIn. I mean exactly the idea of making it so that social networking is just a side effect of the other things that you do.

If you look at gmail, the address book is already populated with recent contacts. And if the contact is on Google Talk, their presence status is included in that contact list.

So now integrate blogs and reader, which are also social networking components, and you'll have already created an experience greater than that which I get from LJ (But would still perfectly integrate with LJ through Atom and XMPP).

And I'd never know that I was on a social networking site.

[sfllaw.livejournal.com]

Exactly right! You don't want Orkut at all, you want something that's a non-social-networking site.

That's because people don't go to social networking sites because they want to. They just want to catch up with their friends and meet new people. If you can do this automatically in the context of other things, like reading e-mail or checking your calendar, then the need for a separate site completely evaporates.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

That's one of the things that I found intriguing when people told me they preferred using Firefox and Thunderbird over the Mozilla suite. I preferred the whole thing together, and I was actually pretty disappointed that it wasn't even more "a single thing" (my wish has been sort of granted, in the form of Gmail, which is exactly what I was thinking of, my inbox being a mere "place on the Internet", that I can bookmark like any other place).

And people keep telling me the same when it comes to email client, newsreaders and feed readers, when they're so obviously so nearly the same thing, it hurts (that said, I have RSS feeds of newgroups, through I don't remember what, and an Atom feed of my Gmail inbox, so I literally combined them all in my NetNewsWire!). The Adium people do it again, where they insist on saying that IM and IRC are entirely different things, they assure me, and that I'd be mad for wanting them (or, say, a software VoIP or video-conferencing) in the same app. 'Cause, you know, group chats and IRC channels, nothing to do with each others.

But these silly people, they don't get it, don't they? Nobody wants to go to a particular site or use an application. They want to do things. Everything else is mere distraction.

I figure we'll get there eventually, with enough bashing on the head...

[sfllaw.livejournal.com]

The reason people do this is that they know too much about the underlying architecture and they believe that presentation should reflect the underpinnings of the system.

This is wrong. Some of the best and most innovative industrial designs are the ones where they seem impossible, mostly because the technology behind them is not what one would assume.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Indeed.