Loadingdata | Daniel Bos

Today the inter­net seems to be buzzing (pun intended) with the rumour Google is build­ing a “Face­book Killer” called “Google Me”. The news broke when Digg founder Kevin Rose tweeted (what else!) about the exis­tence of Google Me. The tweet was pulled soon after­wards, but then for­mer Face­book CTO Adam D’Angelo “con­firmed” the rumour.

The gen­eral con­sen­sus on the dif­fer­ent tech-blogs (Giz­modo, Insid­e­Face­book, Huff­in­g­ton Post, and oth­ers) is not very favourable as to the suc­cess of a Google Social Net­work, and I can’t really blame them, since the lat­est two killers (E-mail killer Google Wave and Twit­ter killer Google Buzz) haven’t seen the suc­cess many anticipated.

It should be noted how­ever that nei­ther have been called killers of any­thing by Google itself, and both have col­lected a large enough fol­low­ing many com­pa­nies could be proud of.

How­ever, more impor­tantly, Google has taken a very impor­tant deci­sion with Buzz, to base it on Open Stan­dards, even if that mend it would lack some fea­tures. This deci­sion has been a huge push for the suc­cess of the OSta­tus stack (Activ­i­tyS­treams, Pub­Sub­Hub­bub, Webfin­ger and Salmon)

The OSta­tus stack, as pro­posed by Sta­tus­Net, and imple­mented by StatusNet/Identi.ca, Cliqset and partly by Google Buzz (work is being done to imple­ment the com­plete stack), allows com­mu­ni­ca­tion between dif­fer­ent Micro-blogs. A con­crete example:

I run my own Sta­tus­Net instance, where I post my sta­tus updates. Some of my friends how­ever use identi.ca, and post their sta­tus updates there. Now, I would like to fol­low their updates, but I don’t want to cre­ate another account which I’ll have to man­age. Luck­ily, since both sup­port OSta­tus, I can just go to my pro­file page, click “Add sub­scrip­tion” and enter “<their-username>@ident.ca”. Now I will auto­mat­i­cally receive their updates in my own instance. More­over, when I reply to their updates, they get deliv­ered to their account on identi.ca.

Admit­tedly, the full adop­tion of OSta­tus in Google Buzz isn’t quite there yet, but Google is work­ing actively with the dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties to final­ize the dif­fer­ent stan­dards, and is com­mit­ted to inte­grat­ing these in Google Buzz, to close the last few gaps.

So what does this all mean for Google Me? Well, my hopes (and expec­ta­tions) are that Google will con­tinue on this path, of using open stan­dards. Not only with respect to the com­mu­ni­ca­tion between dif­fer­ent net­works, but one step fur­ther: also with respect to Data Porta­bil­ity (e.g. pick­ing up your con­tact list from one ser­vice, and mov­ing to the next service)

Just imag­ine what the world must have been like in the early days of the inter­net, before the inven­tion of the “@” sign for email. That’s right! Ini­tially you could only email peo­ple on your own server! If you wanted to keep in touch with some­one on another server, you had to go there and reg­is­ter a new account. Now, does that sound familiar?

When Google started with Buzz, their phi­los­o­phy was not to cre­ate “yet another micro blog”, but to cre­ate one hub in a fed­er­a­tion of microblogs. To com­pete not by build­ing another wall, but by build­ing a bet­ter user experience.

In the last years Google has proven to be com­mit­ted to this path, e.g. by drop­ping their pro­pri­etary Auth­Sub for OAuth, by adopt­ing Portable Con­tacts, by using your Google account as an OpenID iden­tity and by the Data Lib­er­a­tion Move­ment. I expect noth­ing less for the future.

So will “Google Me” be a “Face­book killer”? Short answer: No. Long answer: If Google Me con­tin­ues on the path Google has been tak­ing for the last few years, it might set in motion a move to a more open and fed­er­ated social net­work­ing expe­ri­ence, which could force other social net­works, includ­ing Face­book, to tear down their walls and become hubs in a fed­er­a­tion of social networks.

May the best user-experience win, but lets stop build­ing walls around our ser­vices to pre­vent users from migrating.

Rec­om­mended watch­ing: “Bridg­ing the islands: Build­ing fluid social expe­ri­ences across websites”

Posted from Bei­jing, Bei­jing, China.

Related posts:

Did you like what you read? Consider supporting me:
Today the inter­net seems to be buzzing (pun intended) with the rumour Google is build­ing a “Face­book Killer” called “Google Me”. The news broke when Digg founder Kevin Rose tweeted...