Can Google really get in so late in the game? This Google Friend Connect thing does sound mighty interesting and I’ve signed up for the preview release, however, I don’t know if it will take over from the likes of Facebook. Nor am I sure that social networking sites will go the way of the dodo just yet. They will morph, I’m sure but I don’t think they’ll disappear completely. Take the good old Usenet newsgroups – they have effectively morphed into the many online forums around the world today. Usenet is dead yes but its spirit lives on in the shape of these online forum communities.

I think the success of Facebook is largely down to two factors right now. Firstly, unlike the social networks of the past (or ‘present’) like MySpace, its very clean and easy to use. Some personalised MySpace pages used to make your computer curl up in a ball and shake uncontrollably in the corner of your room as it tries to understand the badly coded css sheets and the layer upon layer of transparent custom imagery. The second big factor is that it was first marketed only to University students and then when they opened it up, it was still more geared towards the “young professional” ex-University students.
These are the people who don’t have time to stay in contact with everyone they know as much as they’d like to. The news feed gives them the short updates that makes them feel involved in the lives of their friends they don’t get to see much. Apart from the fact that Facebook has become a kind of Friends Reunited for free service, the main reason I think it has been successful is its replacement for email and msn/aim. People can’t be bothered with email anymore – too much spam, too complex email addresses, too much work. A lot of people can’t be bothered to instant message anymore either, it takes up too much of their time.
I think that Google realise this and know that it’ll be a mighty hard task to overthrow Facebook, since its not just a social networking website, it is a whole new form of communication. They’re not the only ones to realise this either. Why do you think Microsoft paid so much for it when they bought Facebook out?

Can Google really get in so late in the game? This Google Friend Connect thing does sound mighty interesting and I’ve signed up for the preview release, however, I don’t know if it will take over from the likes of Facebook. Nor am I sure that social networking sites will go the way of the dodo just yet. They will morph, I’m sure but I don’t think they’ll disappear completely. Take the good old Usenet newsgroups – they have effectively morphed into the many online forums around the world today. Usenet is dead yes but its spirit lives on in the shape of these online forum communities.

I think the success of Facebook is largely down to two factors right now. Firstly, unlike the social networks of the past (or ‘present’) like MySpace, its very clean and easy to use. Some personalised MySpace pages used to make your computer curl up in a ball and shake uncontrollably in the corner of your room as it tries to understand the badly coded css sheets and the layer upon layer of transparent custom imagery. The second big factor is that it was first marketed only to University students and then when they opened it up, it was still more geared towards the “young professional” ex-University students.
These are the people who don’t have time to stay in contact with everyone they know as much as they’d like to. The news feed gives them the short updates that makes them feel involved in the lives of their friends they don’t get to see much. Apart from the fact that Facebook has become a kind of Friends Reunited for free service, the main reason I think it has been successful is its replacement for email and msn/aim. People can’t be bothered with email anymore – too much spam, too complex email addresses, too much work. A lot of people can’t be bothered to instant message anymore either, it takes up too much of their time.
I think that Google realise this and know that it’ll be a mighty hard task to overthrow Facebook, since its not just a social networking website, it is a whole new form of communication. They’re not the only ones to realise this either. Why do you think Microsoft paid so much for it when they bought Facebook out?

Great feedback Phil. I updated my post to address your comment.

Great feedback Phil. I updated my post to address your comment.

Perhaps the social networking sites in a few years could be where search engines went in the first decade of the web. Remember when Lycos, Altavista and Webcrawler were big names on the web? I think there will be a similar shakedown of the social sites given their number though some niche ones will likely live on, perhaps LinkedIn which is geared more toward professionals.

Another thought is the question of where will the web browser be in a few years as well. RSS feeds are kind of like that old “channel” idea that was back in IE 4s time. Will other old ghosts of browsers past come back to haunt us? Time will tell.

Perhaps the social networking sites in a few years could be where search engines went in the first decade of the web. Remember when Lycos, Altavista and Webcrawler were big names on the web? I think there will be a similar shakedown of the social sites given their number though some niche ones will likely live on, perhaps LinkedIn which is geared more toward professionals.

Another thought is the question of where will the web browser be in a few years as well. RSS feeds are kind of like that old “channel” idea that was back in IE 4s time. Will other old ghosts of browsers past come back to haunt us? Time will tell.

This proliferation of social media will make applications like ping.fm even more valuable. I don’t actually want to spend all day updating my social media sites, but everyone I know wants me to join their special network, and I feel like I need to at least have a presence on most of them.

For example, I was asked to join one called mytransponder.com (for pilots) by the guys who are developing it. I felt it would be an insult to them not to sign up.

Now I’m sure pretty soon I’ll be getting a lot more requests like that. I’m debating whether or not to just tell everyone I’ll only maintain one site and leave it at that … but then I’ll miss out on the opportunity to reach more people.

It’s easy to drown in this already – and now you say brace for a flood?!

Thanks for the great info,

Joe

This proliferation of social media will make applications like ping.fm even more valuable. I don’t actually want to spend all day updating my social media sites, but everyone I know wants me to join their special network, and I feel like I need to at least have a presence on most of them.

For example, I was asked to join one called mytransponder.com (for pilots) by the guys who are developing it. I felt it would be an insult to them not to sign up.

Now I’m sure pretty soon I’ll be getting a lot more requests like that. I’m debating whether or not to just tell everyone I’ll only maintain one site and leave it at that … but then I’ll miss out on the opportunity to reach more people.

It’s easy to drown in this already – and now you say brace for a flood?!

Thanks for the great info,

Joe

Hi ya Freddie,
Thought Id make a guest appearance on the new blog
Any business that can make use of the Internet’s 2 main efficiencies: Communication and Information dissemination has a chance at success.

The evolution of the web has seen myriad advancements in making those 2 things easier.

‘community’ sites leverage the ‘communication-ability’ of the web.

In the early days, anyone could put up a webpage…‘anyone’ referring to someone who understood how to buy a domain name, install & use webauthoring software and FTP. Needless to say, it wasn’t your dad. There was something missing from this equation…for many, it was simply a billboard in the cloud. It was liberating to have this omnipresent voice…but it wasn’t really communicating. It was like us sending that repeating message into space that we hope aliens will hear. Even when putting up websites got easier, there was something missing. In reality, the web took off because of that other web efficiency: information dissemination, but it was only ½ satisfying- at least for individuals. (for commercial endeavors: it was a natural; simply a new billboard/ad space- later with transaction abilities! Die middleman. Die. Die!).

There was yet to be a truly satisfying community experience on the web (even though with the likes of usenet and other newsgroups, we knew it was possible)…that opened up the opportunity for social networks. As an aside, this is one of the great things about blogging…the ability to disseminate info- then allow discussions about it!!! (btw: love the tmtyl blog here). New stuff like Tumblr are attempting to fuse the efficiencies with a view towards easier UI…lets see how it goes.

Myspace won the early soc network/community war because they appealed to the things that early adopters get off on…freedom to hack. Every hurdle you install (making something fee based vs free, restrictions on who can join, etc, limits the number of users -especially at early adopter phase). You had to be affiliated with a school in the early facebook days, myspace let you put up a page for your hampster- and you could LURK!!! and see pictures of pretty girls in far off lands. Now, as community site audiences normalize and mature, that which put myspace on top is now that which is providing the opportunity for facebook. Its clunky and kludgy….and a little bit sketchy. And now facebook allows all these 3rd party apps that allow a deepening (theoretically) relationship between users. Letting other folks expand off your platform is a good thing (ask early Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates) And as sweaty prince balmer of the kingdom of msft famously said: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6304687408656696643

What else went wrong with Myspace? As with Yahoo, user experience was compromised for the benefit of a newly developing monetization scheme. Does Depends adult diampers have a myspace page yet? Im sure myspace will ‘roadblock’ their users with links and ads to cajole everyone to visit it (note: facebook under msft showed this dangerous ingnorance with Beacon). Knowing why people come to your site and use your services is paramount to success (Tom take note: its really not your obsession with indie music). This is the same reason why new Napster has failed and Google has won.

A few words on some worthy topics:

Yahoo vs Google
Yahoo was never a tech company (despite its engineers- that wasn’t their orientation- everyone grab a black button-down we are media moguls!). They were a human edited directory that relied on employed humans to populate their categories with worthy sites. Needless to say, that doesn’t scale well (we could argue about volunteers doing it like wikipeedia, or closer to the point, newhoo, which was acquired by netscape 10 years ago and became mozilla directory). At the end of the day, yahoo knew their users weren’t getting answers from their own info repository, so paid google to do algorithmic ‘fall-thru’ results until they realized they helped build a competitor and bought the inktomi search engine.
That is the tech…now UI problem: people didn’t ‘get’ the web early on and didn’t know how to find stuff (and search engine indexes we small anyway). So people went to Yahoo. Traffic took off. Yahoo started making $s on banner ads, paid for on an impression basis. Yahoo realized they needed to add content to keep people turning more pages on the site so they could make more $s. They paid for some early content. Then the tides changed…and they got the leverage and content sites began to pay them! That model was based on ad rev sharing…so Yahoo did 2 things: 1)added services like webmail- a loss leader, to keep people coming back and creating ad impression inventory and 2) added as much conent and internal links as possible to keep you on the site- regardless of quality/bredth/depth of info they had (which was often from singe sources as per their content paid deals) and user experience. Yahoo became a cluttered, biased mess.
Google on the other hand realized from its Stanford project days that the value (to users and therefore ultimately company valuation-wise if you didn’t screw it up) was to be the intermediary between what people are looking for and the place they can find it.
The “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that was from the old Stanford days remained as a testament to that…the idea that you didn’t even have to go to a results page on the google site to get to where you wanted to go…which was NOT on the google site. And…the better Google did its job, the more frequently you would come back…(I will omit the discussion on the premise and philosophy of the google ad program and how it was natrural to turn into adwords (centralized ad program) and adsense (distributed ad network).

Altavista and all those dead guys vs Google
All the original search engines were unable to scale (increase their index sized) without substantial degradation in the quality of their result ranging. Basically…the web grew in # pages, but when the 1st gen guys tried to add pages, they became less useful. Google actually got better the more pages it searched. PERIOD. (oh yea…and its architecture allowed for off the shelf components= cheap fault tolerance and redundancy.

Napster
People used it because it was a way to pirate music for free. Some VC throught that there MUST be a way to convert all those users to some other business. I likened it to setting up a diamond shop in the back corners of McDonalds restaurants. Ultimately, everyone left (since the RIAA targeted it and users were feeling the heat and fled like rats in an on-fire building) someone else bought the brand name and tried to rebuild it…but they weren’t the best UI or experience…and Apple won that war.

Now…what does this have to do with Google Friend Connect?
Community is a natural on the web. Right now myspace and facebook are satisfying the needs for it- in a centralized fashion that allows for monetization on those respective sites. In reality, the functionality is easily extensible in a distributed manner. Hence friend connect. Its not like centralized sites would go away (though I agree it sucks to update multiple sites- this is a solvable problem that Im sure dozens of companies are working on). So much of what is on my/book face/space is garbage/trite/gossip/lurking/ boredom killing. Myspace without pics of you partying is worthless. Its more about voyeurship than value-added communication. Yes…real communities exist and there is real stuff going on there..but Im certainly not friends with those guys. Id rather go the official website of whatever hobby/interest/obsession im into and have the community there with that circle of ‘friends’ and discuss that topic.
On that note- why the hell cant I have circles of friends where they don’t interact or see each other on facebook? I don’t necessarily want my football friends seeing/interacting/knowing they even exist with my symphony friends. Im a complex guy. I cant keep my lives separate and private in the current system. STUPID! Bad UI. We aren’t all 13 going to the same middle school.

There is room for centralized and distributed versions of this. Just look at Googles ad program. Google has ads on search results on its own site…and contextual ads on a zillion sites on the web. All targeted. All relevant. All pooled from the same database/network. Cool.

Google will find interesting ways to tie users of friend connect together (introducing you to new friends (opt-in) that share your interest and/or serving relevant ads against you- wherever you are). There is room for all of this stuff…’cause the functionality takes advantage of one of the key efficiencies of the net itself.

Full disclosure: I was an early guy at Netscape working in strat dev at netscape.com and a really really early Google biz guy. I am now retired- so my views are my own.

Hi ya Freddie,
Thought Id make a guest appearance on the new blog
Any business that can make use of the Internet’s 2 main efficiencies: Communication and Information dissemination has a chance at success.

The evolution of the web has seen myriad advancements in making those 2 things easier.

‘community’ sites leverage the ‘communication-ability’ of the web.

In the early days, anyone could put up a webpage…‘anyone’ referring to someone who understood how to buy a domain name, install & use webauthoring software and FTP. Needless to say, it wasn’t your dad. There was something missing from this equation…for many, it was simply a billboard in the cloud. It was liberating to have this omnipresent voice…but it wasn’t really communicating. It was like us sending that repeating message into space that we hope aliens will hear. Even when putting up websites got easier, there was something missing. In reality, the web took off because of that other web efficiency: information dissemination, but it was only ½ satisfying- at least for individuals. (for commercial endeavors: it was a natural; simply a new billboard/ad space- later with transaction abilities! Die middleman. Die. Die!).

There was yet to be a truly satisfying community experience on the web (even though with the likes of usenet and other newsgroups, we knew it was possible)…that opened up the opportunity for social networks. As an aside, this is one of the great things about blogging…the ability to disseminate info- then allow discussions about it!!! (btw: love the tmtyl blog here). New stuff like Tumblr are attempting to fuse the efficiencies with a view towards easier UI…lets see how it goes.

Myspace won the early soc network/community war because they appealed to the things that early adopters get off on…freedom to hack. Every hurdle you install (making something fee based vs free, restrictions on who can join, etc, limits the number of users -especially at early adopter phase). You had to be affiliated with a school in the early facebook days, myspace let you put up a page for your hampster- and you could LURK!!! and see pictures of pretty girls in far off lands. Now, as community site audiences normalize and mature, that which put myspace on top is now that which is providing the opportunity for facebook. Its clunky and kludgy….and a little bit sketchy. And now facebook allows all these 3rd party apps that allow a deepening (theoretically) relationship between users. Letting other folks expand off your platform is a good thing (ask early Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates) And as sweaty prince balmer of the kingdom of msft famously said: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6304687408656696643

What else went wrong with Myspace? As with Yahoo, user experience was compromised for the benefit of a newly developing monetization scheme. Does Depends adult diampers have a myspace page yet? Im sure myspace will ‘roadblock’ their users with links and ads to cajole everyone to visit it (note: facebook under msft showed this dangerous ingnorance with Beacon). Knowing why people come to your site and use your services is paramount to success (Tom take note: its really not your obsession with indie music). This is the same reason why new Napster has failed and Google has won.

A few words on some worthy topics:

Yahoo vs Google
Yahoo was never a tech company (despite its engineers- that wasn’t their orientation- everyone grab a black button-down we are media moguls!). They were a human edited directory that relied on employed humans to populate their categories with worthy sites. Needless to say, that doesn’t scale well (we could argue about volunteers doing it like wikipeedia, or closer to the point, newhoo, which was acquired by netscape 10 years ago and became mozilla directory). At the end of the day, yahoo knew their users weren’t getting answers from their own info repository, so paid google to do algorithmic ‘fall-thru’ results until they realized they helped build a competitor and bought the inktomi search engine.
That is the tech…now UI problem: people didn’t ‘get’ the web early on and didn’t know how to find stuff (and search engine indexes we small anyway). So people went to Yahoo. Traffic took off. Yahoo started making $s on banner ads, paid for on an impression basis. Yahoo realized they needed to add content to keep people turning more pages on the site so they could make more $s. They paid for some early content. Then the tides changed…and they got the leverage and content sites began to pay them! That model was based on ad rev sharing…so Yahoo did 2 things: 1)added services like webmail- a loss leader, to keep people coming back and creating ad impression inventory and 2) added as much conent and internal links as possible to keep you on the site- regardless of quality/bredth/depth of info they had (which was often from singe sources as per their content paid deals) and user experience. Yahoo became a cluttered, biased mess.
Google on the other hand realized from its Stanford project days that the value (to users and therefore ultimately company valuation-wise if you didn’t screw it up) was to be the intermediary between what people are looking for and the place they can find it.
The “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that was from the old Stanford days remained as a testament to that…the idea that you didn’t even have to go to a results page on the google site to get to where you wanted to go…which was NOT on the google site. And…the better Google did its job, the more frequently you would come back…(I will omit the discussion on the premise and philosophy of the google ad program and how it was natrural to turn into adwords (centralized ad program) and adsense (distributed ad network).

Altavista and all those dead guys vs Google
All the original search engines were unable to scale (increase their index sized) without substantial degradation in the quality of their result ranging. Basically…the web grew in # pages, but when the 1st gen guys tried to add pages, they became less useful. Google actually got better the more pages it searched. PERIOD. (oh yea…and its architecture allowed for off the shelf components= cheap fault tolerance and redundancy.

Napster
People used it because it was a way to pirate music for free. Some VC throught that there MUST be a way to convert all those users to some other business. I likened it to setting up a diamond shop in the back corners of McDonalds restaurants. Ultimately, everyone left (since the RIAA targeted it and users were feeling the heat and fled like rats in an on-fire building) someone else bought the brand name and tried to rebuild it…but they weren’t the best UI or experience…and Apple won that war.

Now…what does this have to do with Google Friend Connect?
Community is a natural on the web. Right now myspace and facebook are satisfying the needs for it- in a centralized fashion that allows for monetization on those respective sites. In reality, the functionality is easily extensible in a distributed manner. Hence friend connect. Its not like centralized sites would go away (though I agree it sucks to update multiple sites- this is a solvable problem that Im sure dozens of companies are working on). So much of what is on my/book face/space is garbage/trite/gossip/lurking/ boredom killing. Myspace without pics of you partying is worthless. Its more about voyeurship than value-added communication. Yes…real communities exist and there is real stuff going on there..but Im certainly not friends with those guys. Id rather go the official website of whatever hobby/interest/obsession im into and have the community there with that circle of ‘friends’ and discuss that topic.
On that note- why the hell cant I have circles of friends where they don’t interact or see each other on facebook? I don’t necessarily want my football friends seeing/interacting/knowing they even exist with my symphony friends. Im a complex guy. I cant keep my lives separate and private in the current system. STUPID! Bad UI. We aren’t all 13 going to the same middle school.

There is room for centralized and distributed versions of this. Just look at Googles ad program. Google has ads on search results on its own site…and contextual ads on a zillion sites on the web. All targeted. All relevant. All pooled from the same database/network. Cool.

Google will find interesting ways to tie users of friend connect together (introducing you to new friends (opt-in) that share your interest and/or serving relevant ads against you- wherever you are). There is room for all of this stuff…’cause the functionality takes advantage of one of the key efficiencies of the net itself.

Full disclosure: I was an early guy at Netscape working in strat dev at netscape.com and a really really early Google biz guy. I am now retired- so my views are my own.

Joe’s post had made me think a bit more about this. Most people can’t be bothered maintaining more than one social networking presence. I for one can’t be bothered with the likes of MySpace, for example. To be honest, I don’t think I’d even bother signing up for any other social networks right now unless I was personally invited by the devs. Yes I’d love the idea of a mini social network for (as Freddie mentioned) for things like your local football team etc but it would have to be integrated into what I already use and check hundreds of times a day. Facebook seems to have put its “Groups” system on the back burner significantly with the layout redesign and let’s be fair, the group system was only really used as a way of having funny “member of” names in your profile. Maybe they are working on something similar to what Google’s proposing but in a far more integrated way to what they currently offer. This is what the group system was meant to be but it just wasn’t done properly. It had most of the things people might have wanted from a mini-network, discussion boards, photos, member lists etc but it just wasn’t right. I’d imagine something like a merge of Facebook groups and the usability that Apple talks about in its Web Gallery demo videos.

Joe’s post had made me think a bit more about this. Most people can’t be bothered maintaining more than one social networking presence. I for one can’t be bothered with the likes of MySpace, for example. To be honest, I don’t think I’d even bother signing up for any other social networks right now unless I was personally invited by the devs. Yes I’d love the idea of a mini social network for (as Freddie mentioned) for things like your local football team etc but it would have to be integrated into what I already use and check hundreds of times a day. Facebook seems to have put its “Groups” system on the back burner significantly with the layout redesign and let’s be fair, the group system was only really used as a way of having funny “member of” names in your profile. Maybe they are working on something similar to what Google’s proposing but in a far more integrated way to what they currently offer. This is what the group system was meant to be but it just wasn’t done properly. It had most of the things people might have wanted from a mini-network, discussion boards, photos, member lists etc but it just wasn’t right. I’d imagine something like a merge of Facebook groups and the usability that Apple talks about in its Web Gallery demo videos.

Just a quick reply from thoughts on Phil’s comments. at one time or another I’ve been on yahoo groups, irc message boards, hi5, spoke, linkedin, facebook, friendster, tribe and myspace.. and at times had multiple accounts on different ones. In the end there is a cross roads where the exclusivity of your network is compared to the content and ui where i think its most effective.

I could see a facebook widget system that would allow minibooks onto other sites, much like how gchat works within gmail.

but despite the demographic differences between say, tribe (funkyartburningmantypes) and hi5 (latinamerica) the ui is specific to how much our world is exploding, more specifically, facebook is not doing so well with seniors. who are growing in the friendster and myspace arena (one more than the other but I can’t recall..) so its much like a shopping mall.. demographics as well as store offerings are where its at. Lincoln road for some, dadeland for others.

So despite google, (their secondlife fighter still isn’t rocking that well), Facebook will have significant staying power if it learns to become smaller..just bc some customers want toasted sandwiches does that mean you switch the model that results in slower lines for coffee as starbucks just figured out.

I see a facebook engine running underneath other sites, but all connected still.. all skinned and customized by the site, but still using the guts of facebook for ease, simplicity and familiarity. I would love to be on a dive content site and see all my friends in a minibook window that were connected to me on facebook, who also liked diving.

I am sure padi, cayman islands tourism, and usdiver et all would love that as well, and would pay for it.

Just a quick reply from thoughts on Phil’s comments. at one time or another I’ve been on yahoo groups, irc message boards, hi5, spoke, linkedin, facebook, friendster, tribe and myspace.. and at times had multiple accounts on different ones. In the end there is a cross roads where the exclusivity of your network is compared to the content and ui where i think its most effective.

I could see a facebook widget system that would allow minibooks onto other sites, much like how gchat works within gmail.

but despite the demographic differences between say, tribe (funkyartburningmantypes) and hi5 (latinamerica) the ui is specific to how much our world is exploding, more specifically, facebook is not doing so well with seniors. who are growing in the friendster and myspace arena (one more than the other but I can’t recall..) so its much like a shopping mall.. demographics as well as store offerings are where its at. Lincoln road for some, dadeland for others.

So despite google, (their secondlife fighter still isn’t rocking that well), Facebook will have significant staying power if it learns to become smaller..just bc some customers want toasted sandwiches does that mean you switch the model that results in slower lines for coffee as starbucks just figured out.

I see a facebook engine running underneath other sites, but all connected still.. all skinned and customized by the site, but still using the guts of facebook for ease, simplicity and familiarity. I would love to be on a dive content site and see all my friends in a minibook window that were connected to me on facebook, who also liked diving.

I am sure padi, cayman islands tourism, and usdiver et all would love that as well, and would pay for it.

Google has not come up with any thing great except the search engine which was not built by Google as a company but by its founders. There has been lot of hype about different tools google building but no tool till yet has lived up to the expectation. All the good things like google map have been aquired by google, not built by google. Software Egnineering behine myspace or facebook is not great. Any five developers can develop such site in a month. It’s about people using the site and trusting it enough to provide personal information. It’s not about building the site.

Google has not come up with any thing great except the search engine which was not built by Google as a company but by its founders. There has been lot of hype about different tools google building but no tool till yet has lived up to the expectation. All the good things like google map have been aquired by google, not built by google. Software Egnineering behine myspace or facebook is not great. Any five developers can develop such site in a month. It’s about people using the site and trusting it enough to provide personal information. It’s not about building the site.

The Google Friend Connect site went live this morning.

The Google Friend Connect site went live this morning.