If you have a Google Voice phone number, calls made from Gmail will display this number as the outbound caller ID. And if you decide to, you can receive calls made to this number right inside Gmail (see instructions).

I know I wrote about the continuous Google Me rumors recently, and the VOIP integration seemed like a logical extension at the time.

Social features are starting to permeate all of Google’s products. Lots of products are getting mobile updates. Even the Contacts application has been recently and nicely revamped. What if all of these changes are really related to Google’s new social push and Google Me?

Given this idea, the VOIP inclusion with the contacts updates still just seemed like a small move in a bigger plan. The recent release of GMail Priority Inbox has me thinking that there might be a different direction:

Priority Inbox splits your inbox into three sections: “Important and unread,” “Starred” and “Everything else”

Granted, this seems like a logical extension to GMail and a good way to deal with the flood of information that people receive daily. The only problem with this is that GMail and its inbox has not changed in years. I had always figured this was one of those “sacred” areas that could not be touched. Priority Inbox is not a small adjustment either. Partitioning your inbox into 3 sections based upon importance is definitely a Google thing to do, but it is a fairly big change. In addition to the basic concept, the inbox learns as you use it:

Over time, Priority Inbox gets better at predicting what’s important to you. You can help train it using the buttons.

So, this likely means that this change is part of a bigger plan as well. By including VOIP, text chat, email priorities and a vastly improved contacts manger, GMail has become your communications hub. Google is obviously taking many chances to increase your engagement. If you include Google Buzz in this equation, you can see the makings of a social network. If you look at this from the Google Me perspective, why put this much work into GMail when you will push people to Google Me in the hopefully near future? That seems fairly short-sighted or there is no communication within Google projects. Or there is another option.

Some people have been arguing that email is the first social network. What if your email program became your new social network? What if those changes to Orkut were really a way to move it closer to GMail? Let’s look at the feature list I wrote about for Google Me:

• Messaging provided by GMail
• IM provided by Google Talk
• Google Buzz integrated with the basic status updates on the network
• Orkut, new and improved with social circles provides the core social network features and a platform to build upon
• Google Docs integration so that you can share documents with specific social circles
• Picasa integration so that you can share pictures with specific social circles
• Wave integration so that a specific social circle can have real-time collaboration features.
• Latitude integration in order to share location information with specific social circles

Messaging is already provided by GMail, and it has IM integration. Google Buzz has already been integrated with GMail, but not entirely thrust in your face yet. Social circles could likely be inferred from your email history within GMail. GMail has integration with Google Docs. The real-time collaboration features would be an interesting addition to GMail, may be more successful there because there is not a new contacts list to create and it deals with people you already collaborate with. Latitude integration would be the only tricky thing to include as the integration has to be done very carefully. If it gets pushed through Buzz, then Google would be following the Foursquare/Gowalla route. If it has deeper integration with your social circles and email, then it could be more like Facebook Places and promote more serendipitous meetings. That is one of the greater potential benefits of social location services.

I am not sure if Google is really making GMail your next social network, but there is a lot of work that seems to be moving it in that direction. It could be that Google Me is just a name for GMail 2.0.

Related posts:

• Is Google Me The Merging Of GMail, Buzz and Orkut?
• Google Buzz Is Just A Baby Step
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As an example, look at Google Wave. Wave was extremely aggressive in what it was trying to do, reinventing email and collaboration. In hindsight, we can easily say that the change was too great for mainstream adoption, but there were a lot of people that love using Wave for collaboration. What if Wave was really just a market test of real-time technologies and collaboration? If that was the case, then Wave was hugely successful in testing real-time collaboration. They also received useful feedback on their “reinvention” of email and saw first-hand how resistant to change people can be.

Timing is also another important feature of these types of market tests. Google Buzz was released and had privacy issues around the same time that Facebook was having serious privacy issues. Buzz was not a reinvention of email, but it was a limited foray into changing your inbox. It looks just like any other folder. Sometimes Buzz items end up in your inbox because you commented on them as well. Buzz saw some backlash about the integration with email, but that criticism did not really stick with the product. Maybe Google was onto something.

In the past few months we have also seen the “real life social network” presentation from Google researcher Paul Adams. The presentation talks about the limitations of current social networks and how people really interact differently with their various circles of friends. That presentation spurred many of the rumors about the possibility of a new social network called Google Me.

Now, we see that Google Orkut has received an interesting update.

we all maintain different groups of friends (or “social circles”), and the Internet was not able to reflect that. Until now, social networks treated people from different groups like they were all the same: they were all “friends” … To make it easier for you to interact with your groups of friends, now you can open them from your homepage. Your groups will always be a click away from you, on the top of the page.

So, social circles are being introduced to Orkut where you can share items differently with each group. This is very interesting timing. Orkut is getting some nice updates, and people continue to talk about Google Me. Social features are starting to permeate all of Google’s products. Lots of products are getting mobile updates. Even the Contacts application has been recently and nicely revamped. What if all of these changes are really related to Google’s new social push and Google Me?

Think about Google Me with the following features:

• Messaging provided by GMail
• IM provided by Google Talk
• Google Buzz integrated with the basic status updates on the network
• Orkut, new and improved with social circles provides the core social network features and a platform to build upon
• Google Docs integration so that you can share documents with specific social circles
• Picasa integration so that you can share pictures with specific social circles
• Wave integration so that a specific social circle can have real-time collaboration features.
• Latitude integration in order to share location information with specific social circles

I would not call this a Facebook killer, but I would be very impressed if this is what Google Me had in store for us. It takes a long time to kill an application with 500 million users. The difference in this case is that Google has millions of users already in various products and could quickly ramp up to 100 million users. That would make for an interesting battle between Google and Facebook.

Related posts:

• Is Google Me Really GMail 2.0?
• Google Buzz Is Just A Baby Step
• What Google Me Needs To Succeed

We’re working with an initial set of partners including Gowalla, foursquare, Yelp and Booyah‘s InCrowd to enable users to share check-ins on Facebook.

Booyah has an application soon to be released already, and Gowalla is already talking about building on top of the Places platform. So, Facebook has started with some good third-party adoption. Assuming that these partners get access to the write API, integration will probably be swift.

However, having partners does not mean you don’t get to make fun of them. The funniest part of all this was the inclusion (or exclusion) of Foursquare:

Facebook has now “helped” out Foursquare by making them wonder what’s next. They also welcomed the company up on stage to announce that they would … GASP … consider what to do with Facebook Places! Wait, so their launch partner didn’t have early access to the Places API? Nope! Instead, Holger Luedorf of Foursquare was brought on stage to announce nothing, just stand there.

That is a nice slap in the face, but the public API is read-only for now so there is little that a third party can do. Of course, this gets more interesting as Facebook opens up the write API, which would make Facebook a location sharing platform. As a platform, Places becomes much more interesting.

First, look at the Places API that is currently available. You can lookup a specific check-in by ID, all the check-ins for a user ID, or all of the check-ins for a “place page” ID. What is a place page? Well, the API documentation has a short note about that:

Check-ins are associated with locations represented by Facebook Pages; the location must have a Facebook Page ID, whether the Page was created on Facebook directly or using the Open Graph protocol.

So, this location database is being displayed and stored as Facebook pages. If you look at the main help page for Places, they have already answered some basic questions like “How do I claim a Place I represent?”. This is interesting because it unifies the painful location database merges that other services have needed to deal with. Because Facebook has 500 million potential Places users, they will quickly become the defacto standard for location databases.

There is one major problem with Places, it is very limited in functionality. You can search a little, and you can check-in. They are only providing a platform for third-party developers to fill in the details. I think this was done for a reason. They want the users to determine who has the best application. The winner gets purchased by Facebook, in what I call the Facebook Places Sweepstakes, so that they can integrate the most mainstream application that their users already wanted. This is market testing at its best.

Of course, it would be easy to just say Foursquare is king, but the location applications are very immature still. My personal favorite in the Facebook Places Sweepstakes is Groupon. The main reason is that Groupon has a significant application that is not based solely on check-ins. We have seen that businesses like the idea of giving discounts to the “mayor” or people that check-in. Yelp is another interesting possibility as it has a significant number of user reviews that can not be ignored and it has check-ins too. Adding discounts for frequent diners or even new visitors would be simple to add if it was integrated with Places.

What this all points to in the end is search. Facebook is becoming a major player in search because of its size. If you look at Facebook Questions, that is a way to create a knowledgebase on Facebook. If Places does gain adoption and starts to include more content from Yelp and basic check-ins from Gowalla and Foursquare, Places could be the business recommendation service everyone has been looking for. As an example, John Battelle complained about Google yesterday when he tried finding a yogurt shop a mile away. At the end he mentions the obvious:

What if Foursquare or Facebook had Places search? Man, that’d be great! I could search for yogurt shops in Edgartown, and I bet, without a doubt, I could find what I’m looking for.

Yep, that is what this is about, relevance and location in searches.

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Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects. The central parts of the code, as well as the protocols that have driven many of Wave’s innovations, like drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are already available as open source, so customers and partners can continue the innovation we began. In addition, we will work on tools so that users can easily “liberate” their content from Wave.

Google Wave was supposed to be a game changing application. However, there were a few fundamental flaws. Most importantly, Wave was looking to replace email and throw in a whole bunch of collaboration and real-time features. The problem with this is that email is too big of a target to take on directly. Facebook has a better chance of changing email because people already live in their environment and have gotten people used to the idea that things change. GMail was a very different email client when it was launched. Wave was going after something that people did not see any reason to change, and people are very resistant to change.

Another problem Wave had was that it was a solution looking for a problem. What problem did Wave solve? Was it collaboration? No, there are plenty of products being used around the world for that. The real-time aspect of Wave was not a solution to anything either. Seeing people typing did not help the collaboration, but real-time has all the hype so it was included. Maybe we can get some of the interesting features added into GMail and slowly grow into something bigger than email.

Wave’s other major problem was marketing. It was marketed as “what email should be” or a next generation email. Louis Gray explains what it really should have been considered:

At its end, Google Wave, for Google, was as much an application environment as it was a destination…It was thought of as potentially disrupting e-mail, and as recently as the South By Southwest conference (SXSW), the company’s GMail team was being asked questions about competing with Wave for attention and resources at Google, and the panel called it “a leapfrog project” for the future Web, not today’s Web.

Google called it a leapfrog, when it really should have been an environment or platform. I have not looked at developing for Wave, but supposedly it has a very good API and plugin architecture. If Google had targeted this as an application environment, maybe it could have taken a different direction. By targeting developers, you get a lot of free help building an ecosystem around your platform. Just ask Twitter how important the ecosystem can be.

So, instead of everyone collaborating in real-time, we just need to say our farewells to some really cool technology. Hopefully we will see parts of Wave in other Google products soon.

Related posts:

• Is Google Me The Merging Of GMail, Buzz and Orkut?
• Google Wave Redefines The Rules
• Is Google Me Really GMail 2.0?

However, if you look at the popularity of these sites, and the type of content that is posted to these sites, you will notice some common issues. First, if you follow enough people, the stream moves very fast. This can happen once you reach 1000 friends, or less if you follow people that post frequently. If you look at the type of content that gets posted, you do not notice any real differences. So, a link posted from this blog and CNN look basically the same. Photos and Videos also look the same, and in some cases are actually just links to a photo sharing service. Are these things really all the same? More importantly, should we really be treating these things all in the same manner?

Another problem is that most people are not very good at reading a large list of items. People like to see what is interesting and popular. They also like to see things that may be related to one another. I am not talking about personal customization, but about grouping related items. For example, over the past few weeks we have seen World Cup action. With a stream based interface, you may see a World Cup related item, and then 20 items about technology, humor, world news or religion. At the end of that list is another World Cup related item. There are only 2 things these 20+ items have in common, time and your network.

Why is this a problem? People tend to be very visual. People also take a lot of time to process information. So, if the stream is going by very rapidly, you can “miss” items due to your processing time. If your network is large enough, those missed items will likely reappear in your stream later. On the other extreme, if an item is popular enough you could see it several times in your stream which obviously does not add any real value. In this case, we are not using the power of the social network except as a source of information. We are not even aggregating the information.

A stream of unrelated items, or only related due to their time of publishing, is a terrible way for people to consume information. However, it is a perfect way for programs to consume information. Programs will use time as another attribute of the item, just like the person that published the item and any other information it can infer. When we see something that is more appropriate for a program rather than people, that something becomes a protocol or a specification. So, can we all agree that the stream, and the way that Facebook and Twitter post information, is the specification? Also, now that the specification is defined, can we start building things that people will like to use?

Just remember streams are good for programs, but suck for humans. The question now is what can we build with the streams? Can we now build the boat so that we can navigate and not drown in the stream?

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As we have seen during the amazing rise of Facebook, many other social networks have stagnated, died or changed directions. Google’s Orkut is just one example, MySpace is another. So, what makes this time any different? Now, people know what works. People know what keeps people engaged on social networks. The social components of the web have evolved as well.

So, what does Google need to do to make their rumored foray into social networking succeed? Not surprisingly, there are already several opinions about this. The Next Web has two ideas. First, they think that it should be a combination of Orkut and Buzz. The second thing they mention is that Google should not target Facebook, but target LinkedIn. Taking a business-oriented approach is a good idea, mainly because Facebook is heavily targeted towards casual usage and informal conversations. However, going completely business-oriented would be a mistake because it would be limiting the potential user population.

First, what features does Google Me require?

• Simple connection building, including autodiscovery of connections using various email and social network accounts. Some people will initially be upset by this, but every other network already does this.
• Deep integration of Google Buzz. Buzz is the FriendFeed clone that would work perfectly as the sharing technology of choice. It does more than Twitter, and it is getting easier to use. It is also very similar to Facebook’s current stream.
• Deep integration of Google Profiles. The profiles that Google have built are quite informative and extensive. They can quickly be cleaned up to be a solid social network profile page.
• Integration of Google Places. Inclusion of Google Places, previously known as Local Business Center, would be a huge bonus for small businesses. It would make Google Me leap ahead of Facebook’s business offerings.
• APIs from Orkut. Orkut may not be a popular social network, but it does have a solid set of APIs and it is based on OpenSocial.
• Simple Application Platform. Steal this idea from Facebook as it is core to their success. The widgets scattered in various Google applications have not really been adopted, but Facebook hit a home run with their platform.
• Integration of Google Analytics. I am not talking about the complete suite of reports, but having some level of basic statistics, even for profile views, would be a good idea. People could track every page view, every link click and quickly gather some social metrics this way.

Also important is what to omit. TechCrunch has an excellent opinion on this:

What Google shouldn’t do – must not do – is try to tie the service to other Google products for the wrong reasons. Microsoft’s web properties are constantly hobbled by the strategic decisions of a parent company that must protect an aging Windows and Office revenue stream, for example. Google must avoid that pitfall.

As an example, there is no reason to hook in Google Docs. People do not want an office suite in their social network yet. This is especially true when you first launch. Also, GMail should remain a separate service in the beginning. Let people sign up with an email service of their choice, with the address being hidden. You can allow people to send messages to each other and send everything to their preferred email address. Eventually, you can bake email into the network, but do not shove it down people’s throats at the beginning. Google Reader should not be integrated, except for the integration it has with Buzz. Trying to make a social network the only site a person visits is a quick way to fail. Picasa can be avoided initially as well. Why? Because you need to find a good way to integrate Picasa and Flickr without being too Google-centric. YouTube does not need to be integrated either as long as people can share links.

[UPDATE] Somehow I forgot about Google Wave, and thanks to a comment I will now include my opinion. Wave should not find its way into the initial launch of the social network. The comment mentions the main reasons as well, it is too heavy and too complicated for mainstream usage. It could be added later, and would be great for groups and collaboration but it is definitely something that should not be integrated into the main experience.

That is probably enough information for a quick overview. Are there applications that I missed that should be included? Or are there more applications that should be omitted?

Please ignore this code WSTXS88MVR99

Related posts:

• Is Google Me The Merging Of GMail, Buzz and Orkut?
• Is Google Me Really GMail 2.0?
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However, in order to be infrastructure, Facebook realized that the walled garden approach would not work in the long term. They needed to become more open, and their steps in this process have caused much of the privacy angst. Jesse Stay has an excellent perspective on how Facebook broke our trust:

The problem with starting out private is that users are being tricked into thinking their data will never be exposed.  It’s too difficult to know what is open, and what is private.  Sure, privacy controls are cool and all, but what good are they if no one knows how to use them and everyone just assumes that everything they put on the service will remain between just them and their “friends”?

However, he does not continue down the same privacy road as others, he takes a different direction saying that these steps were needed:

Privacy is good.  So is openness.  Identity is good.  Anonymity is not.  By making Facebook a more open place, they are encouraging us, as a society to be more open about what we share.

So, openness from Facebook is good for the users. Openness from Facebook is also good for developers. As I mentioned earlier, if Facebook wants to become infrastructure. In order to do that, you must provide openness in the form of APIs and other hooks. By providing these capabilities, Facebook is providing developers the opportunity to interoperate with Facebook. People can create open source versions of the API so that other sites may conform to the standard without completely giving in to Facebook. By allowing this level of interoperability, Facebook is basically giving us a way to build applications that may lure some users away from them.

The big problem here will be decentralizing identity again. Blaine Cook has an excellent post on identity where he says “the centralisation of identity is stifling innovation on the web.” I do not agree with stifling innovation, but it may be hampering it. Thankfully, there are many people looking at identity and authentication. We already have OpenID, OAuth and XAuth as functioning standards. There are also newer technologies for identity like WebFinger (Google Group) and Mozilla Account Manager. The biggest hurdle for all of these technologies is adoption rate. Facebook already has a few hundred million users. Email providers could have been the identification source, but many had tied themselves to OpenID and nothing else.

Let’s take a different perspective on this. What if Facebook being the main identity provider is not a bad thing? If you go to a site and you login using your Facebook credentials, that provides a simple experience for the user. Given the new OpenGraph initiative, this site will be able to take advantage of your preferences within your social network as well. If other social applications start adopting the Facebook APIs, OpenGraph and other standards, then they could provide the same general experience as Facebook. Because of Facebook’s new found openness, these other sites could become your default social provider. As Facebook provides more openness, they give us more opportunity to define the future and decentralize again. This is not a bad thing.

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When you have people like Chris Saad and Dave Winer talking about something, you know you need to pay attention. They seem to be talking about the same thing, but taking different angles of attack. They also seem to throw “likes” into the discussion as well, further confusing people. However, they both have some very good points. First, Chris talks about interoperability:

Data portability is no longer enough. We must raise the bar and start to aim for Interoperable Data Portability. Interoperability means that things work together without an engineer first having to figure out what’s on the other end of an API call… Just like every site on the web today can have its own web server, every site should also have the choice to host (or pick) its own social server. Every site should become a fully featured peer on the social web.

Technically speaking, any site that implements the OpenGraph Protocol, a data specification, has interoperable data portability. Any service may read the open graph data and act upon it. Chris was focused more on the data portability aspect, whereas Dave was focused more on the graph consumer in his post on services being replaceable:

Think of it this way. There is no root to the web. There is no home page. No place you have to go first before you go anywhere else. Same idea — there shouldn’t be any center to the graph-of-everything. That’s where the bar should be set. And Facebook ain’t even in the ballpark… Anyone should be able to operate a graph. And of course we should be able to point into graph.facebook.com, and not just at the root, but into any bit of data they expose.

Technically speaking, any site may be a consumer of the data of the open graph. The difficulty is knowing how to get at the data, which is Dave’s real target. Should we have a graph.domain.com specification? The key here is that Dave is talking about specifying an API for the graph for any data that a site may expose. This is a much larger vision of what the OpenGraph could become.

So, how do we merge the data specification of the OpenGraph with an action oriented API that avoids the “center of the graph” problem? First, look at the OpenLike Protocol that was created in response to the Facebook Like concept. This is really an open specification of the type of functionality that is currently provided by ShareThis and AddThis. This also does not really do the same thing as the Facebook Like. As a web content producer, this really does not help me much either. I would still be sending data to various services that would become the “center of the graph”.

One specification does support likes and various other actions. It could easily support the data specification for the OpenGraph, and already has much of what is needed. It is already supported by Facebook, MySpace, Windows Live, Google Buzz and many other services. I am talking about the ActivityStreams standard. This could be used to support all sorts of functions for a web site. ActivityStreams also has a very active mailing list if you want to get involved.

While I can appreciate what the OpenLike Protocol is trying to do, we do not need to reinvent the wheel. What we need to do is gather more support for ActivityStreams and help with the general implementation of them. How can a content producer use ActivityStreams? Can we make it as simple as possible for someone to plug this functionality into a WordPress blog? Can the data be stored locally or at least have the information stored at the service of our choosing? If we can really push this forward, many of the Facebook widgets become unnecessary. We could even have third party services built based on ActivityStreams to provide statistics and analysis about the activity.

What can you do to further the progress of ActivityStreams?

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