The mother of all distributed social networks
It looks like thats exactly what Google is building.
Google recently launched Google Profile - a centralized profile system that will be integrated into most of the Google services and will provide a coherent identity across the Google network. You control how much information is shared as part of your public profile. Several products like Google Reader, Google Maps have already integrated Google Profile into their service.
Why do I say a distributed social network ?
Let me illustrate with an example.
If you use Google Reader, you’ll now see shared feeds from your friends
Click on any of your friend’s shared feeds and you’ll see their profile and actual feed itself. The same goes for Google Maps as well. By providing a single profile across all these services, now you can easily view and track what a Google user is upto. Do they have a Blogger account ? What sort of personalized maps have they created ? What local businesses did they recently review ? As an example, see my GMaps profile here. It wont be long before you’d be able to see a user’s entire activity stream across all Google Services (constrained by what all info they choose to share).
Instead of being in a closed-wall, centralized social network, your activity is distributed across the various Google services. And it all comes together in one place - your Google Profile.
You really need to look at the big picture ‘to see’ the distributed social network that I’m talking about. Imagine MyBlogLog (the most notable distributed social network) where each blog is a separate Google service. The blog community page on the MyBlogLog website is equivalent to your Google Profile.
December 21st, 2007 at 5:23 pm
I am famous!
I like the profile cards they launched. Apart from this, I think they will start promoting G accounts as an alternate to openid. If several other sites are using Google login as the primary login, Google will know that you have joined other services, which are not owned by Google.
Talking about the shared feeds. I find it really great. I might write a plugin (or use an existing) to import my shared items to Wordpress.
December 22nd, 2007 at 12:59 am
Be sure to check out MyBlogLog’s Services tab on your profile and the new About Me widget to see a distributed social network in action.
http://mybloglogb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/12/the-mybloglog-a.html
Ian
Product Manager, MyBlogLog
January 2nd, 2008 at 11:59 am
Gaurav,
they need to introduce granularity / privacy settings before introducing this across the other services..