God bless Danny Sullivan. You should read his latest post tonight in which he tries to squeeze some information — any information — out of Google chairman Eric Schmidt about today’s rather disastrous deep Google+ integration into Google Search. Unfortunately, all he gets are bursts of hot air.
Schmidt tells him that Google would be happy to talk with Twitter and Facebook about integration into the new Search+ features. So why didn’t they do that before, you know, they rolled the feature out? Well, never you mind that. Schmidt refuses to say one way or another if they did or didn’t. “I’m not going to talk about specifics.”
My understanding is that they didn’t. But perhaps more telling is the fact that they didn’t have to.
Both Twitter and Facebook have data that is available to the public. It’s data that Google crawls. It’s data that Google even has some social context for thanks to older Google Profile features, as Sullivan points out.
It’s not all the data inside the walls of Twitter and Facebook — hence the need for firehose deals. But the data Google can get is more than enough for many of the high level features of Search+ — like the “People and Places” box, for example.
Once upon a time I wanted a better Twitter app for my iPhone, so I wrote one. My goal was to make something simple, beautiful, and intuitive. It’s been a wild ride since 1.0, and over the last year and a half Tweetie has gone from a no-name app from a little known software company to an app hailed…
Well, as you may or may not know, Google has recently announced its latest creation: Google Buzz.
There’s plenty of buzz about it on social media sites like Twitter, but I’m stuck here wondering, as though I’ve seen something like this somewhere before. Oh, of course! Google Wave. You know, Google’s attempt to re-invent email, which hasn’t exactly taken off like some people expected.
How is Buzz similar to Wave? Well, Buzz is essentially transforming Gmail into a Wave-like platform, minus what seems to be the widget flexibility and real-time document collaboration that Wave has. In that regard, Wave is more powerful and Buzz is more similar to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Which, to me, pretty well describes Buzz: an addition to transform Gmail from a powerful web-based email application to a Wave/Facebook/Twitter hybrid. It’s Wave-like in regards to focusing around — and adding on to — an email-esque application, Facebook-like in regards to keeping in touch with friends and posting content such as photos and video, and Twitter-like in regards to pushing out status messages and updates to everyone. Yet it doesn’t do any of these particular things as well as each individual service, in my view.
With services like this and Wave, both of which are restricted to an enclosed environment (either requiring Gmail or Wave’s proprietary messaging format, respectively), and random ventures like the Google phone (which has had its own problems), I’m starting to wonder what they’re thinking over at Google HQ. It’s almost as if they’re trying to get a piece of every pie available and making it proprietary to them, instead of focusing on just a couple of pies and doing great there. The last thing I want to see is Google going the way of Microsoft. *shudder*
