Clunky Flow

The move:
Google have made an API which they call the Social Graph API.

The hook:
The move looks utterly benign as Google announce it as a significant advance toward the goal of helping you ‘liberate’ your personal data. Google is ‘liberating’ your personal data from the ‘protectorship’ of the likes of Facebook and MySpace. Information is meant to be free and these walled gardens have controlled access to your information long enough. Google is ‘liberating’ your data. And this will allow you to move your social graph from one service to another. It will also allow you to pull out the social graphs of others and move them from one service to another.

The sucker punch
This advance is good for users and good for developers, but my God is it good for Google too. I presume that this toolset will be very popular. I presume that this also means that Google is making copies of all this data on their servers. I presume this will places Google at the very centre of all the information about your web-mediated social life. Which is a space that until a minute ago that everyone thought was occupied by Facebook and MySpace etc.

The final word
I presume the Google guys are sitting in their office writing an email something like this:

Dear Facebook, MySpace, OpenSocial partners..whoever.

Ahem. In case you haven’t noticed.
All you bases belong to us.

Larry and Sergey.

The next move:
The final task left for Google now is to build/acquire a platform that will enable anyone and everyone build bespoke social networks for anything and everything. Something like Marc Andreesen’s Ning.

So how did these guys get so badly wrongfooted by the Google’s ninja moves?

Well they weren’t paying attention to what is important. The long game, the strategy. While everyone was shouting about Facebook opening its platform and OpenSocial and all that, Google was planning its killer moves. To explain let me refer you to what may be the best quote that was never heard in 2007. I’ve lifted it from Tom Morris who posted it earlier today.

I haven’t bought into the OpenSocial hype…Not interesting… Facebook vs. OpenSocial, as if that actually mattered in the long run (the social network fight is doomed to one winner - the Web-… )

Google have always understood this. Ning has always understood this. And both have focused on positioning themselves. So that they will be in the best strategic position to reap the reward as this inevitability unfolds.

Hats off.

***As an important piece of plumbing in the social web, I’d be very interested in what the SIOC guys make of all this.

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Ah Google targeted ads. Such a revolution and spookily accurate in the way they offer you what you want when you want it. Like when you search Paris and the ads are for Paris hotels. Simple. Effective. And worth a fortune. Google makes an average of 20 cent for every search made via its associated advertising.

As I write Damien Mulley is on Marian (RTE Radio 1 Saturday 8th at noon) telling us how Google use very complicated mathematical algorithms to know what you are actually looking for and thus send better you more targeted ads.

The value that Google offers is that the ads you get are relevant to you, targeted to your needs wants and desires.  What you want, when you want it. They achieve this by constantly profiling you and your searches and activity within Gmail, docs and spreadsheets etc.

I don’t know what tweaks they’ve been making to their algorithms of late but more or less as I was listening to Mulley and using Gmail, Google suddenly started to believe that I was not male at all but actually female (news to me).  But not just your average female either. But one who this Saturday morning was beginning to feel interested in embarking on a career selling sexual services. The “sponsored link” which I first noticed this morning at the top of one of my Gmail accounts announces

“Dublin Ladies Wanted - www.cosmos-escorts.com - We are looking for attractive young ladies in Dublin. Please apply now!”

 …which links to an escort service which seems to be operating from Germany.

A bit left of centre. A mildly amusing misjudgement.  Now, there is nothing in my search history or activity online (and you’ll have to trust me on this) that would suggest that I am a female considering employment in the sexual services industry. I found it interesting that Google could get it so wrong. This of course won’t stop me using Gmail or any of the Google online services. I really like them and will continue to use them. But I can only imagine my mothers reaction if she was offered such an ad through a service I recommended. I’m pretty certain she’d be highly dissapproving.

Damien Mulley’s final words on Marian..”companies should be transparent and should tell you what they think of you, what profile they have on you”

Couldn’t agree more. I’d love to see how they put my profile together to come to the conclusions they came up with this morning.

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Much as I love this cartoon, I think it distracts from the more interesting (and ultimately) more important story arc that applies to Google: Are we disdainful yet?

Right now. The answer would seem to be yes. 

Eric Schmidt recently

• dismissed the refusal of social networks such as Facebook to let Google scan their content as a “transient” phase.

This remarks demonstrate

• a peculiar disdain for peoples’ natural desire to maintain some privacy with respect to their social interaction
• an apparent blind spot to the fact that a natural desire for privacy means that monetizing personal interaction is a fundamentally different business to monetizing search

and

• suggests that Google maintains a curious belief that it will soon be able to publish all the data it wants over and above what the producers of that content want. And be justified in doing so.

To put these remarks in context, we have to remember that Google is a company who’s business relies on internet search. Internet search has been the killer app. of the web and Google have been the most successful company at delivering and monetizing that service. However, search has recently been superceded by social interaction as the new killer app. of the web.  Internet users now spend much more time and energy engaged in social interactions mediated across the web than they do in searching for content.  And this social interaction is occuring within walled gardens that exclude Google from accessing its contents in order to protect the privacy of it’s attendees.  

Given the context, it would seem that Google

• is getting tetchy at being excluded from a party it considers itself ’entitled’ to attend.

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