Failing Forward

• Xanga – yes, it’s still around.
• Facebook is getting too cocky for it’s own good.
• Twitter seems to have addressed it’s scaling issues (TechCrunch had a fun time over the summer, posting frequently regarding outages).
• MySpace, the Internet Cesspit, hit such a popularity peak that it’s not going anywhere, unfortunately.
• Orkut is huge [in Brazil and India].
• Classmates.com is, despite their horrible advertising, performing well enough (according to ComScore).
• Digg just keeps [slowly] gaining momentum.
• Wallop is Microsoft‘s half-baked and obligatory “Hey!  Look at me, too!” site.
• LinkedIn is a great site (although I think they could use a redesign).
• Yahoo gave up on Mash.

I could keep going for quite a while.  It’s no small secret that the web is turning into a social platform.  We’ve even got companies that try to aggregate social sites.  And ones that try to abstract the very idea of a social site.  This stuff is really settling in.  But what is one name you don’t see on that list?  One big name on the Internet scene.  One that starts with a G.

Yes, Google bought Orkut.  But they’ve done nothing with it, nor does it appear as if they will.  They’re more interested in the real players of tomorrows’ social data streams.

I’m not sure that anyone has stopped to assess Google as a social networking platform.  Let’s go through the procedure.

1. You have your Gmail account because, hey, it’s the single best interface to email you’ve ever used.
2. Gmail gives you an instant messaging address.  Then it embeds the chat client into your browser.  Got friends who are on Gmail, too?  You can chat with them while responding to your emails contributing to your conversations.
3. A friend sent you an email and offered to meet you for dinner.  They said, “Let’s meet at the Tavern at 6:30 this Wednesday.”  And Gmail, off to the right-hand side of the message when you open it, posts a neat little link to add this even to your Google Calendar.  Because, if you’ve got a Gmail account, you’ve got a Google Calendar account.  Convenient.
4. A coworker sends you an email with a Word Document attachment.  Gmail appropriately adds a link where you can open the attachment as a Google Doc.  Edit it right online.  That way, if you have to work in the other office tomorrow, you can access the current file version from wherever you have an Internet connection.  Better yet, allow your associate access, and you can both edit it, on the cloud, in real time.
5. A family member emails you some pictures, and you notice that it’s convenient to upload them to Picasa Web, since you’ve already got a Google Account.  It’s a pretty intense application, so you stick with it.  You can share these photos with anyone you wish.  Set up slide shows.  Tag people.  Comment.
6. You visit certain sites with RSS every day, so, you decide to try out Google Reader.  See how it works.  It works well, so you stick with it.  Then you notice that when people from your Gmail contacts share items on their Reader account, you can view those shared items, and vice versa.  You can comment on shared items, by the way.
7. Google now owns YouTube, so you can post, share, comment on, and rate videos without creating another account.  Nifty.
8. Do you have a blog?  Lots of people do.  It’s called Blogger.  Which Google now owns.  A good site, and they made it better.  Of course blogging allows for link swapping and comment-posting – that’s the point.
9. If you’re familiar with Google Checkout, a growing number of sites are supporting it now.  I trust Google more than I trust your-favorite-trinket-site.com.  So, you pay Google, Google pays your hobby site, and only one party ever sees your credit card numbers.  You just have to log in with your Google Account.

I use all of these applications.  They work.  And they work well.  In fact, they routinely exceed my expectations.  That’s why I still use them.  They’re quick, clean, concise, and easy.  And, a lot of times, fun too.  And hey – if I have family, friends, or coworkers, then I can share, collaborate on, and comment on, content from any of the above services with them.  And, as the months continue, these applications are all talking to one another more and more.

Sound familiar yet?

A “real” social networking site builds their own brand of a contact list.  And then, around that concept, they take “real-life” ideas like email, instant messaging, status updates, photo and video sharing, blogging, microblogging, etc., and sort of smash those concepts down into the framework they’ve built.  Facebook messages being a concise form of email.  A MySpace page is kind of like a blog.  Twitter is nothing but a bunch of short status updates.

These companies take the idea of connecting people, and then add in boiled down versions of other standard and proven Internet activities.

Google is not a social networking site.  Google is a social networking platform.  But why don’t people ordinarily think of it that way?  Because they’re coming from the other direction.  Their (well deserved) success in web search allowed them to launch a number of different projects, specifically the above list – their core application suite.  And then they said “Well, one Google Account gives you access to all of them, so why don’t we let the people, and the applications, communicate?”

And now, in this stage, you can create a public profile, and manage many different services from one single page.  What gives them the advantage?  They’re not restricted to the brand of one single site.  Their platform allows them to develop full scale and enterprise ready web applications (or buy them – think YouTube, Orkut, maybe Bebo or Twitter, we’ll see), and then simply link them to your account.  Google’s ownership of YouTube will do to the average video site what Wal-Mart is doing to that local Mom and Pop store that’s been around since you were born just gone out of business.

Genius.  And bravo to Google.  It makes them a dangerous player in the social networking market, whether or not ComScore considers them in the running for such.  It also puts the onus on Google to get things [like security] right.  Recent bugs found in Google Docs haven’t made privacy advocates happy (of course to be fair, privacy advocates will never be happy).

Google: Kudos for the sleeper attack.  But don’t lose your focus or drop the ball.  Privacy concerns and anti-trust bluffs are two current, very public, attack vectors to your stretegy.  If the market finds a third, it’ll hurt.  Resoundingly.