Google and the social - reflections on the coming impact of Google Profiles and the Jyri-factor
Maybe it’s just something I like to think because I feel connected to Jyri Engeström from the early days of Jaiku evangelism in Sweden, but I think we are now beginning to see his work and thinking spread slowly all over Google services. After a lot of preparations behind the scenes, Google is taking some carefully thought out steps in line with Jyri’s ideas about social objects and “face rank” that as they mature will knit the whole range of Google services into what I believe will become a stong, lively and very very social network of data and interaction objects and people.
The Google user profiles, that Jyri is behind to a large extent, are giving people a way to represent themselves across Google services. The profiles may seem a bit disconnected and a poor replacement for Facebook or any such strongly profiled and obvious “social network”, but the Google account is becoming the center of news, calendar, mail, documents, location, comments and a host of other today more or less separate and disconnected services. When Google starts making that profile relevant in more and more ways, this will change. Look at some small recent changes to Google Reader:
Suddenly we have little icons in here. My friends, and their content, in a prominent place. Almost like a “newsfeed” right? Imagine these icons and profile elements turning up in more places in the near future, anywhere you collaborate with people.
Not many people care very much about their Google profile at the moment, but when this profile starts showing up in more and more places the idea of shaping it up will be much more attractive. With better API’s and Google Connect it will soon be everywhere.
The profile information is of course also used in the new Latitude service. I have no idea how involved Jyri is in this service, but it looks like there is lots of Jyri inspiration in there to me.
Quiting Jyri’s own profile page:
“He is currently Product Manager of social & mobile at Google, where he has been responsible for areas of Google’s social infrastructure including Google Profiles (behold this page!), Google’s sharing model, and the Social Graph API. He is currently focusing on Google’s mobile communication applications.”
A common “complaint” with Google and their “Contacts” concept is that these contacts don’t represent your “real friends” and that there is almost no relevant social graph data in there. Google contacts are just random people you emailed. Facebook looks much stronger in this regard, but I think that will change soon too. Everyone and their mother might be on Facebook, but everyone and their mother seems to have a Google account somewhere too. Guided by Jyri’s thoughts on sharing and social objects, we are already seeing privacy levels in Google contacts, and I think we will see Google connect more and more of their services with the Google profile as the hub that ties social objects and the interaction around them to your account-as-online-identity.
When people start using the privacy levels of friends, family, co-workers offered up when using services like Latitude or “My maps” or email, this social graph data will be built on the fly and while doing something else, not by actively seeking out and adding people as friends. There is a difference between having “add as friend” as the main activity or having it just happen when your purpose is something else. I think these other purposes - sharing my calender with my mother or sharing my photos with my “family” are stronger and more interesting representations of social networks than the Facebook model. Not for everything and not in a way that will immediatly replace and spell the death of Facebook, but as something that will grow and use the scale and cleverness of many google tools and then one day we will have Google as a major social platform. In many ways it already is, it just needs to be carefully brought out and presented to the user. It’s like this hugely powerful computer system that at the moment only has a slightly clunky command line interface, and now they are bringing in people like Jyri to dig into the possibilities of that machine and make the magic inside it avaliable to users. It was there all the time, but lacking perspectives on what to do with it and how to think about it.
The Google profile is creeping into one Google service at a time, and with Jyri’s thoughts about object centered sociality driving those changes I think Google is finally going to “get” social. It’s not all there yet, but watch and wait. I thought from the start that Google was buying the talent of Jaiku, rather than the specific technology or userbase. Buying the experience of launching a large scale successful social service with some very clever thoughts behind it. I have no inside information and might be completely wrong, but regardless, I think they got one of the smartest thinkers about social behavior online in the driver’s seat on developing the social features across the Google family of services, and that was a damn smart move that we are only beginning to see the poweful results of.
If Jyri’s influence on these things is as strong as I think it is, I also see it as a really interesting example of how some thoughts and ways to frame a problem domain are truly disruptive.
Yes, this is a Jyri fan post. Now go fix your Google profile. Here’s mine.
