Google made a very smart move by enabling social apps to interconnect via the APIs they are providing. Soon all participants will be able to create or host social apps for third parties, not just for Facebook. This is exactly what the world needs. And Google once again did it. I won't add much to what is already said (discussion here)
However i just have why question that i could not find the answer to until this morning: "Why is Google doing that?" i mean, what is Google really getting out of all of this?
After all those will be sets of Apis where Google will not appear on the front end. I think there is one obvious answer and one less obvious
- There will be able to leverage a new real advertising estate within those new built social apps that will profit to hosts/developer and....Google of course
- They will be able to build the best people search in world by having direct access to the largest social graph in the world and being able to get very quickly to a massive critical size of users across platforms
Do you see anything else?
Technorati Tags: google, opensocial
I'd say Google is moving away from "just" structuring the world's knowledge to what the web now is : instead of a pure content chain (find content through content) they now enable finding content through people who lead to new content (the content-people-content chain), not only on the Google network but also (and most important nowadays) outside.
I agree it's a very smart move as it is a mandatory ingredient in the new behavioural advertising space that is directly linked to building an external ecosystem that will rely on a vastly deployed open graph of people and relations. Next step : endorse openid ?
Posted by: oliparr | 01 November 2007 at 04:23 PM
I'd say Google is moving away from "just" structuring the world's knowledge to what the web now is : instead of a pure content chain (find content through content) they now enable finding content through people who lead to new content (the content-people-content chain), not only on the Google network but also (and most important nowadays) outside.
I agree it's a very smart move as it is a mandatory ingredient in the new behavioural advertising space that is directly linked to building an external ecosystem that will rely on a vastly deployed open graph of people and relations. Next step : endorse openid ?
Posted by: oliparr | 01 November 2007 at 04:24 PM
The (not serious) answer...
Since they have so much money and so many talented engineers. They need to do something with it.
Eventually, it will be an effort that will only panic, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc... but they will eventually stay high in the market.
Do you remember applications called Froogle? or Google Checkout?
eBay, PayPal, Shopping.com, Shopzila, etc.. freaked out when they came out. and where they are now?
Few more engineers are stuffed with Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream and the world has move on.
No need to stress from everything Google does.
Posted by: Ori lahav | 04 November 2007 at 07:23 PM