If your aim is to own the world (and all the world's advertising), then you don't want a large chunk of your better-off subjects doing their socialising on Facebook, where you can't so easily get at their data [or in NewSpeak, social graph].
Obviously you're supposed to use Orkut, so Google would have a record of your identity and your social network, as well as your search records, your email, your calendar, logs of your online chats and much of your surfing behaviour, your photos and your documents. But while Orkut has been successful in some places, such as Brazil, it failed in the US.
So, according to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch:
Yesterday a select group of fifteen or so industry luminaries attended a highly confidential meeting at Google's headquarters in Mountain View to discuss the company's upcoming plans to address the "Facebook issue."
The meeting was so secret that all attendees had to sign confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements strictly forbidding them from discussing what was shown to them at the meeting. Notwithstanding that NDA, I've now spoken with three of the attendees off record to get an understanding of what Google is planning .
The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google's social graph data. They'll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google's personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.
Later in the story, he says:
In the long run, Google seems to be planning to add a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services, with Orkut as their initial main source of social graph information and, as I said above, possibly adding third party networks to the back end as well. Social networks would have little choice but to participate to get additional distribution and attention.
Google would then be able to target its advertising even more accurately, because it could tie its cookie and ad-based website tracking to your real identity.
No doubt Microsoft, Yahoo and others are wishfully thinking along the same lines. However, it could be a killer strategy for Google because it dominates the online advertising business. Thanks to AdSense, it can make far more money than anybody else, even if they have a much better product.
Conspiracy theory? Or is Google really the Future Borg? What do you think?
