Google Is Becoming More Social

Just over an hour ago, I was checking my RSS feeds using Google Reader and noticed a few interesting things that I have not seen before. Google Reader is a RSS feed reader that is completely web-based. If you’re not into RSS feeds and you find yourself checking any website more than once a day, I highly suggest that you look into a feed reader. In short, a RSS feed is a way for websites to notify you that there is new content on the site without you actually visiting the site.

So I was checking out the new Google Reader interface and I noticed that you can now use Reader to stay current with your friends on MySpace, Flikr, WordPress.com, LiveJournal and a few other sites. So what…? Well, one of the most popular new social networking services, at least with the uber-connected, is something called FriendFeed. FriendFeed allows you to link all your social networking profiles together and receive the updates in one location. Now, this isn’t revolutionary news, after all, in most cases you could subscribe to RSS feeds for any of these services and achieve the same result. It only becomes important in light of a few other changes from Google:

1. Google has updated their profile pages. Profiles used to be just a name, nickname, and a list of links to “your” sites. Now the profiles page contains new fields, including your education and where you have lived. Additionally, Google Maps automatically geolocates the towns you enter.

2. Google Reader has always allowed you to share selected feeds with your friends. Now you can add a button to your browser menu bar that allows you to add any site to your Google Reader page and then share it with your friends. It’s not quite Facebook or Twitter, but it’s an interesting development.

3. Google Friend Connect. If you are reading this on my homepage, you can see I installed a widget called Google Friend Connect. I am not completely sure what can be done with this, but I encourage you to become a member. My understanding is that it allows you to interact with my website, just as you would if you joined my site to leave a comment. The difference here is you can use your Google account to sign in and that you can suggest my site, or other sites using Google Friend Connect, to your friends. I am sure there are other applications, but I’m just beginning.

Why, you might ask, is it important to discuss what Google is doing from a social standpoint? Google is in the data business. The reason they are so successful with search advertising is because they have terabytes of data that they can use to ensure your ads are appearing to people likely to buy your products. Even with Google’s amazing ability to target ads, there are better ways to target ads: Friends! It’s happened to all of us before; a friend raves about a product and, even though you weren’t planning on buying one, you end up making the purchase based on your friends recommendation. The only thing better than highly targeted advertising is a recommendation from a friend.

The way I see it, Google is highly successful with search advertising and they don’t want to miss the boat on social advertising. Facebook and MySpace have excelled on the networking aspects, but failed to find a way to monetize their sites. I can’t figure out exactly how Google plans to succeed in this new market, but you can be sure they don’t want to find themselves in the midst of an advertising revolution without the best data.