
Google Doing Some Profile Unification Leading Up To… Well, Something. - icey
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/26/google-profile-social/
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ChuckMcM
Presumably this isn't too surprising to anyone. Lets just take the really
obvious one for the moment.

Google sells advertisements, advertisement "value" is a function of how many
people might see it, monetizing that value depends on a durable number
associated with { users | subscribers | viewers | attendees }.

Over the years Google has bought and to a greater or lesser extent integrated
a number of web properties that had associated with them the notion of an
'identity' but few if any mechanisms in place to bind all of those identities
into a single 'person.'

One of the early abuses of this system was a 'penny' fraud [1] where a bright
young lad used the system to create a number of fictitious accounts which
abused payment systems setup algorithms.

But a more pernicious problem is that you sell someone an ad that reaches 'a
million users' the value is $X but if only 40% of those users are actually
unique people then the person buying the ad feels ripped off. And if you can't
"prove" to them that its not one guy and a perl script, well its hard to
demand top dollar.

Now MG Siegler is a master link-baiter and gets a lot of hits for that but I
feel this, and the "outing" of Google Circles, and just the sheer clamor over
at TechCrunch to be the place where Google's response to Facebook, what ever
it happens to be, is broken first, a bit tiresome. Crying wolf indeed.

There are several million good reasons why Google should unify all of its
profile/user information into a single subsystem and most of them are dollars.
If you have one way to 'do it' then you don't need 50 teams each maintaining
their own set of captcha tricks, there own user data bases, and their own XSS
bug fixes. Put it into one group and force down every other developers throat
(inside Google) and you are good to go.

[1] <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/05/man-allegedly-b/>

