Google Struggles to Build Social Features
But the new project will not include a big gaming element, despite previous reports, said a person who has worked on the products.
“Google’s a pretty serious place,” Mr. Schmidt said. “It’s hard to see how we could end up as becoming a significant gaming or entertainment source. It’s much more likely that we would become an infrastructure for those sorts of things.”
Whatever Google does, its officials said, it would not build a Facebook reproduction that requires users to re-enter all their personal and social data. “I think that there is social networking fatigue,” Mr. Horowitz said.
The stakes are high, because people increasingly go to friends on other sites, like Yelp, Facebook or Twitter, with their search questions. For example, Ms. Li of the research firm recently asked her Twitter friends where to shop for clothes for her middle schooler and got answers from people who know her and her child.
“In the past I could have gone to Google and that would have been a huge advertising opportunity for Gap or American Eagle, but Google never had a chance to see my intention,” she said.
The potential for social information reaches beyond search. Facebook’s most popular feature is photo sharing and tagging friends in pictures. Picasa, Google’s photo-sharing service, is not nearly as social.
The last paragraph is key. How could they possibly try to compete against the “folksonomy” of Flickr and Facebook now?
I’m not so sure Google is fit to “go social” in any regard. As Schmidt is quoted in this article saying, it may be that Google needs to be the infrastructure for games and social software. For them to go and create features seems to me, taking into consideration their past blunders, a bit of a stretch, even for Google.
Posted: October 18th, 2010 under Uncategorized.
