

Has anyone realized Google is creating a Social network right under your feet? - peregrine
http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/answer.py?answer=97703&hl=en

======
nikblack
yes but its just a profile page for now - its not a network until it lets you
establish connections to other Google users. It will be cool though once you
can, then you can see your friends on mobile maps, in Picasa, gmail, chat etc.

There is an overall strategy shift at Google. Years ago they talked about how
apps were basically the results of 20% time. Each app was an isolated silo,
developed in different programming languages, at inconsistent locations and
they shared nothing. Google claim that this is what enabled them to be
innovative. Some apps were born out of organized teams (like Calendar).

What is happening now is that Google realized that many of these applications
duplicated functionality. for eg. contacts in gmail, contacts in calendar etc.
They are starting to centralize the common components like the user profile
and links to apps. Friends will be next.

The result: a platform, not unlike facebook, except the 'apps' are much better
and come from Google. OpenSocial becomes the API to this platform, and they
fill it with users from their search market share. The Google API becomes the
new web API and they won't have to regret not buying Facebook because by that
time they have all their users on an 'unintentional' social network with kick-
ass apps.

Schmidt said that Google is now 'search, ads and apps'. Until recently there
was no strategy to apps, but now there is: they are taking over and providing
the new web OS.

~~~
unalone
I'm going to go out on a limb and say this won't work. Google doesn't have the
right sort of talent to create a working social network. Perhaps they'll get a
small cloud of apps, but that's it. We won't see Google working as the active
hub for people who want to talk online. We won't even see Google with much of
an _informal_ social network like you describe.

The reason is that Google sucks at design. Don't get me wrong: they're
incredible with ideas! Some of the designs of their sites work incredibly well
because they are conceptually leagues ahead of anything else. Gmail was like
that when it came out, and people loved the design for that reason. The
original Google search bar. Google Maps, which was ahead of everything for a
long, long time. But while they can deal well with concepts, they lack
attention to detail.

Google isn't anal. You can tell that some people have it and others don't.
Google may have a few people like that in their organization, but they don't
have a site-wide dedication to pixel-perfection. They make things that are
functional but not beautiful. Their designs don't inspire people, past a
point. And that's great if you're making something that doesn't exist yet. The
problem is that Facebook exists as a social network, and it's extraordinarily
anal. I'd compare Facebook's design to a company like Apple's in terms of
depth. Facebook makes missteps more than Apple, but the level of commitment
exceeds that of any company I've ever seen.

I'm a pretty outspoken Facebook enthusiast; I've followed the things they've
done pretty closely. The things that stand out aren't the major movies, but
the minor ones. It was like how when applications all showed on one page, they
added the dense set of icons for app navigation. Hover over one and you got a
dark dialogue box with white text. Click it and you scrolled down to the
application, which further had a dark blue border for several seconds to call
attention. Everything was custom-coded - no reliance on previous designs - and
worked on every browser.

Three things about that process weren't necessary to work. You didn't need the
dialogue box (which was pretty slaved-on to look perfect, since it's been
copied since then and every other attempt looks pretty awful). You didn't need
the smooth scrolling. You didn't need the border at the end. But the end
result wasn't just a link. It was a _process_. There was an end experience to
using this particular thing.

People will accept less-than-perfect for a lot of things. They have
extraordinarily high standards, however, for social products. When you talk to
people, the process needs to be entirely invisible. If people notice something
working, that's a bad sign. Facebook is very, very good for getting out of the
way. Look at Facebook's complete featureset at once and you'll realize that
most users miss most features, and yet if somebody _wants_ to do something,
it's instantly intuitive how they get it done.

This isn't missed by companies. Look at how Disqus blatantly ripped off
Facebook's pop-up dialogue design. Not blaming them - it's a good design - but
it was still a blatant rip-off. Meanwhile, look at how many people feel the
same connection to Google's design. They rip off _ideas_ , like increasing
mailbox size or simplifying search pages, but how many actual details stick
with people? Not many, because Google's design is bland at best, bad at worst.

Lots and lots and lots of tech people miss this. Partly it's because tech
people skim over design more than normal people. Partly it's because tech
people have faith in the power of technology alone to fix things. That's not
the case. People are very slow to move, and when they do move it won't be with
some subtle, slowly-shifting plan of Google's. They will deliberately pick
whatever network they move to, if any, and this shift is _extremely_ unlikely.

In 2005 I was working on the quality assurance team for a social network
start-up with a pretty neat set of technologies. Part of my goal was to get
other people to move off MySpace. The site I was with, Zoints, had a cleaner
design, more features, and some parts of it were much more intuitive. People
refused to switch. They had friends on MySpace, and they had nothing to gain
from switching. Social networks are all about the users, and they were in one
basket.

This is important not just as a lesson of how hard it is to make people
switch, but of how _good_ Facebook is. Everybody had a MySpace, but they
switched over to Facebook anyway. By the time Facebook let high schoolers
register, they had 85% of _all college students_ as active users, and half of
those were active _daily_. Now I would suspect it has more than just 85% of
all high schoolers registered, and it's leaking down to middle school
registration. People at work use it a lot, and as a result entire families are
signing up.

Many people here don't ask themselves just how that happened, which is damn
shortsighted. I mean, my mother signed up. My _grandfather_ signed up. He
comments on my Facebook statuses. My young cousin got an account. And it's not
like Twitter, where people want to "tap into a network". It's not like getting
a blog. Simply put, Facebook keeps people in contact better than any other
application does. It provides an _incredible_ interface. People who know
nothing about tech just "get it". They figure out how to write photos and
write notes and update statuses and make friends. It's that easy. It's _so_
easy, and so _universal_ , that middle schoolers get them, not just to be
cool, but to talk to other kids. Older family members get them to talk to
their relatives. My mother currently has a network of 39 friends, including
mothers in the neighborhood and friends at work. That's pretty damn
impressive.

Centralization means jack shit. Look at Windows Live. Look at how well that
worked. Yeah, they have millions of users, but nobody _cares_. And Windows
Live Spaces is extremely well-done. It's one of the better products in the
market. Doesn't matter, because even something that's _pre-packaged with the
computer_ is harder to use and grasp than Facebook.

Finally: there is no web OS. Get that idea out of your mind, because it won't
happen. There are web _features_ that work like things that have
_traditionally_ been OS-based, but people say "web OS" like it's a solution to
everything. I thought that too, when I was a Windows user, where all the
applications were shit. Now I'm on a Mac, and I've realized that iChat is
better than Google Talk, and Mail is better than Gmail, and TextEdit is better
than Google Docs. Some people _might_ start using these online tools, but only
until a better desktop equivalent comes out, and the desktop has _incredible_
advantages. A good designer will be able to make better desktop apps than web
equivalents. Look at Mail versus MobileMe (which, for the record, has a better
design than anything Google's ever released; Gmail is better than MobileMe's
mail in terms of features, but the calendar and address book blow Google's
alternatives away, because Google can't design. That's the recurring theme
here.)

Google is good at doing a few things. They simplify problems very well. When
they don't have a competitor, they do a very good job of consolidating and
making good products. The problem is that in the social sphere, they _do_ have
a competitor. In email anybody could use anything: I could switch to Gmail and
not lose anything I had before. With search I lost nothing by switching to
Google. And in both cases, competitors didn't do a thing to catch up until it
was too late.

With Facebook, Google's dealing with a company as young and energetic as
Google itself. They're up against a competitor that revises and updates and
improves even more quickly than Google does with most of their products. It's
a competitor that's shifted the social paradigm several times - a competitor
that, at this point, is at least two steps ahead of Virb, which is the second-
best competitor in the field from a design perspective. Facebook makes Google
look like Plaxo: the ugly competitor that nobody loves because it's too
goddamn open and not attentive enough on the things that really matter.

~~~
ewiethoff
Get the goal of pixel perfection out of your mind. It can't be done, because
you don't have a clue how each person's browser/system is configured. And it
_shouldn't_ be done, because then it's too easy to forget about graceful
degradation.

For example, on account of my accessibility issues, Facebook looks like crap
and its horizontal scroll bar is even defective. And, no, I'm not changing my
configuration just to suit Facebook, or Google, or whatever.

Sorry I'm so testy, but pixel perfection really hits my buttons.

~~~
unalone
Let me be testy back.

 _Get the goal of pixel perfection out of your mind. It can't be done, because
you don't have a clue how each person's browser/system is configured. And it
shouldn't be done, because then it's too easy to forget about graceful
degradation._

That's ridiculous. You don't stop striving for perfection just because there's
no such thing as absolutely perfect. Are you suggesting designers _not_
develop pixel-by-pixel until the site looks like exactly what they want it to
be in their minds? Yeah - that won't work for everybody. At the same time,
that's no reason to stop designing as anally and as focused as possible. I
hate that mindset: by that standard why design at all? Why not make everything
black-on-white, no borders, no margins, just a list of features you can click
on?

Either you design, or you don't design. There's no in-between. If you're
designing something, you had _better_ be designing with everything you've got,
and yes: that means jiggling pixels until they look absolutely perfect. Apple
does it, Facebook does it, I do it. Lots of designers do it. There's no reason
for you _not_ to do it.

 _For example, on account of my accessibility issues, Facebook looks like crap
and its horizontal scroll bar is even defective. And, no, I'm not changing my
configuration just to suit Facebook, or Google, or whatever._

With respect, are you complaining that because you changed your browser's
interpretation of the web, something on another site broke? So now you're
saying that because of the things that _you_ changed on _your_ computer, it's
a fault with Facebook's design. Am I missing something here? Because that
sounds pretty snotty.

If you've got accessibility issues, then you're going to see drawbacks when
you're using things. Yes, that's the job of the designer to fix, but if they
work on fixing it and it's not a completely perfect fix, that's not saying
anything bad about their original design.

 _Sorry I'm so testy, but pixel perfection really hits my buttons._

It's okay. We've all got buttons that get pressed. Mine are pressed when
people suggest that it's not worth aiming for perfection. Every great thing
that's ever been made had people saying it wasn't worth trying.

~~~
ewiethoff
> Let me be testy back.

This is kinda fun.

> because of the things that _you_ changed on _your_ computer, it's a fault
> with Facebook's design

You're assuming my computer came out of a box all set for Facebook and your
anally perfect site. It didn't. And then I had the gall to do something
outrageous to it. I haven't.

You know, a person doesn't need to have major ooga-booga accessibility
problems for sites to be "broken." Try fiddling with the width of your browser
window. Monitor resolutions are all different, plus some people want the
browser window to take up, say, half the width.

Facebook does have a design problem when its horizontal scroll bar is borked.

> We've all got buttons that get pressed. Mine are pressed when people suggest
> that it's not worth aiming for perfection.

Just don't lose sight of graceful "degradation." Plus it prepares the site for
whatever new platforms come along, like the next iPhone.

~~~
unalone
_You're assuming my computer came out of a box all set for Facebook and your
anally perfect site. It didn't. And then I had the gall to do something
outrageous to it. I haven't._

Hm. I just installed Windows XP out of the box, and Facebook works on IE6.
That's as strict a test as need be applied.

Facebook has a fixed width. Is that anything new? Lots of site have fixed-
width. Even if you're too narrow, can't you scroll normally?

 _Just don't lose sight of graceful "degradation." Plus it prepares the site
for whatever new platforms come along, like the next iPhone._

There isn't going to be a "next" iPhone. There's the iPhone. The next big
thing will not be compared to the iPhone at all.

I don't like making things gracefully degrade past a point. I would never
design my web site to work for the iPhone. When it comes to making things
iPhone-accessible, I'll make a separate thing. Same to when I design a
Facebook app for my site.

~~~
jinglebells
If you're testing against IE6 XP that's the worst test you can do.

We test against IE6 + 7 on XP, Firefox on XP, OS X, Safari XP, OS X minimum.
With checking Opera and Chrome to make sure. A complicated design can easily
render significantly differently and break very easily.

IE 6 is possibly the worst browser you can develop for. Get it working for
Firefox and most phones can render it just fine.

~~~
unalone
I test every major browser, mainly because usually everything works right the
first time. I design in a way that doesn't lead to much breakage in any
browser _but_ IE 6.

------
anuraggoel
Has anyone realized Yahoo has been creating a Social network right under your
feet for years?

<http://help.yahoo.com/tutorials/prof/prof/prof_start1.html>

~~~
aaronblohowiak
Yahoo still needs to win the integration componant. Flickr, Delicious, my
email address book.. they have everything they need, they just have to mash it
into one ui. And they are getting there.

------
truebosko
I really like Google's strategy in doing this. They've been rolling out small
social based updates for awhile now across all their various applications.
Some examples of how it's evolved for me personally:

\- In Google Reader, it used to be just me. Now I share stories with (a small
handful of) friends. Now, just a few days ago they added commenting features
for that. Soon, it will probably be public sharing/comments.

\- In Gmail, it used to be just me. Then they added Google Talk into Gmail and
the general routine will be receive email from a contract employer, email back
and forth, and then we end up talking in Google Chat. I never have to leave
Gmail to do all this.

\- With Google Maps, I've created a few maps that I've shared with others.
When we were going on a trip to Montreal I made a little map of hot spots we
should check out. Then, we just loaded it up on the laptop when we were there
and we had our own little guide ready for us.

That's just a few examples, but I think what they are doing is very
impressive.

~~~
div
Not to forget sharing google documents and sharing google calendars, both of
which I regularly do for work. Oh, and then there's the
<http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/> api, designed by google as well.

------
EGF
I call this the social network that is "there when you need it, and not when
you dont" which is the best approach to this space. They are surfacing things
up when you need them and in a non-obtrusive way.

I have written extensively about this exact phenomenon on my blog a lot
recently as I feel that most people do not want a "Social Network" they want
solutions to problems - the naming convention is what we all give it after the
fact.

~~~
Semiapies
I tend to agree, here. I have a Facebook account, but there's nothing I bother
to do with it. On the other hand, with Gmail and Talk and Reader, I keep in
touch with people I know, share links, etc. in a very seamless way.

------
verdant
Google, obviously, doesn't do everything it tries well, but I've always been
impressed with the way they integrate different services. I also have always
appreciated the cleanliness of the UI on their products. Even their ads have
always been text-based, where many other sites went wrong with giant "flashing
text" banners and animation. If Google did build a social networking service,
combined with Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Chat, etc. I think they would have a
strong hand. Since they just announced targeted advertising based on
profiling, gather social data about their users would make perfect sense. I
know its been brought up recently why Facebook doesn't do something similar
with all the data they have. It sounds as if Google is making moves in that
direction, testing the "privacy waters" so to speak.

------
apgwoz
Surprised? Absolutely not. Google has a team of thousands of engineers, all of
which can't possibly be working on it's core products. They'd all be disasters
(See Brook's Law). I for one wonder why this sort of "innovation" didn't
happen sooner.

As an aside, I sometimes wonder what all the engineers at Google do. Obviously
they have an impressive portfolio of products, and I'm sure many internal, and
even more just not released yet, but they're constantly hiring. Will it
eventually get to a point where half of their engineers are just looking for
their keys in play ball pits?

~~~
adamhowell
>constantly hiring

When I left late last year a lot of divisions/projects were in a hiring
freeze, don't know if that's still the case but they've definitely kicked the
100-new-people-in-the-lobby-on-Mondays habit.

> I for one wonder why this sort of "innovation" didn't happen sooner

There are a lot of hoops to jump through for this sort of "innovation". A lot.
As in, these social features started being really pushed by VPs and the like
way back when Facebook Apps launched, and are just now slowly seeing the
light.

------
bcx
With the recent launch of Google Voice, google might end up having the best
social network data of any social network, since they will essentially act as
the phone company, your email provider(Gmail), and your instant messaging
service(Gtalk). (i.e. they could know who all your friends were and how often
you spoke to each of them) [this is assuming you aren't doing all your
messaging through facebook]

------
jupiter
Just providing the means to have a profile page is not enough to have a social
network anymore. There had to be a continuous stream of information to keep
users coming back (buy friendfeed, guys!). But then again Google always had
success by keeping things simple...

------
nostrademons
Orkut?

~~~
whughes
I suspect that Orkut is the Google equivalent of the ROKR, the iTunes phone
that preceded iPhone. It's a moderately successful trial until Google can
really sink its teeth into social networking, whether through its own service
or an acquisition or a Twitter/Facebook clone or a new idea entirely.

~~~
trickjarrett
Orkut was a creation by one of their employees in the early days of social
networks. It was experimental, no one had yet determined if social network
sites really had any staying power. Up to that point I think Friendster had
really been the only one to break any ground.

Orkut also never really got Google's blessing. It wasn't fully integrated into
Google Accounts and for the time I was on it, never even had a Google logo on
the site.

~~~
rglullis
Not true anymore. You're talking about the state of Orkut from two years ago,
maybe longer.

There is integration with Google Accounts, the main page today shows (timidly)
Google's logo and they have a good part of their team in Brazil working on it.

~~~
trickjarrett
Good to hear, I got off of it several years ago. I know it's still thriving in
Brazil but haven't looked into it at all except once in the past year I think
when I somehow ended up on my Orkut page...

