Google wants to conquer the social networking world without creating an explicit social network.
Rather than trying to revive its Orkut networking site, which has been a flop outside of Brazil, the online search giant is weaving the various components of social networks through its existing services. Your contacts in Gmail and Google Talk, for example, are being turned into a list of “friends” with whom you can share photos from Picasa or blog posts from Blogger.
Another piece of Google’s decentralized social network is an option that lets people create a profile page with photos and the usual tidbits about where you went to school and so on.
This week, Google began a campaign to get people to create these profiles, using its biggest gun: the Google search engine. If you want to control what people see when they search for your name, create a profile and click the box to have it included in Google search results.
While some people may well want to do anything they can to hide from the prying eyes of surfers around the world, many more in this narcissistic era will want to ascend to the stage Google is offering them.
There are good reviews of the nuances of this feature from Danny Sullivan, of Search Engine Land, and John Battelle, the author and ad-network entrepreneur.
Are the new profile pages enough to get Google’s ersatz social network to rival Facebook and MySpace? I don’t know. But it doesn’t hurt.
As much Google’s strategy makes a lot of sense as a business, I think it has some real problems for users. Social networks are not just software with features they are — really — communities. What you do on MySpace, Twitter and Facebook are different because each has different rules about who can see what about you and different norms…