Google Circles Or Google Me?

By Blog & 3 more

I have been watching the recent rumours then denials by Google about its own social networking platform. Some have dubbed it the facebook killer (despite not knowing what it was – probably the same people who dubbed wolfram alpha as the Google killer! Lazy Journalism?) – however I came across this inconspicuous search result yesterday:

www.google.com/s2/search/social

On clicking this link (and signing in with my Google account) I was then presented with a list of people I knew via my Google Account, and more intriguingly, a list of all the social network sites that they were part of, as well as a list of posts they had published to these sites. The sites included:

  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Their own websites
  • YouTube
  • Facebook
  • Picasa Web Albums
  • Blogger
  • De.li.cious
  • Google Reader
  • Flickr
  • Quora
  • TinyUrl

I can click on the name of the people in my “profile” and then go through to their “buzz” tag and see all the tweets (and other stuff) they had posted – which in itself isn’t the bit that got me thinking.

What did get me thinking was how Google could use all this information it is very obviously collecting to create a social media platform to rule them all!!

Instead of trying to compete with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and all the rest – why not create a “super” platform that actually feeds in all the social media information, from all your subscribed social media channels all into one place?

This would actually be a better experience for most people as they would be able to keep even more up to date with their social networks (without having to look at multiple feeds in management tools such as hootsuite).

How good would it be to have a Google platform that brought information through (similar to how twitter works) but filled with the posts from ALL the social media platforms in one place – so you would get a steady stream of updates but it would be 5 in a row from twitter, 2 from facebook, another 3 from twitter, one from flickr etc.

If you could then respond directly from one platform BACK to these it would make the management of multiple social media platforms much much easier for everyone.

Google could also then corner the “social search” market (which possibly has them concerned at the moment) – allowing you to search for (or ask for) help across multiple social media platforms at once, without the need to navigate away from Google.

So could the answer be that Google don’t end up offering a “social media” platform – but actual become THE social media platform by integrating everyone else?