Back in 2006-2007, when Facebook was performing their final ascent, Twitter was a twinkle in everyone’s eye and no one was yet talking about the gPhone, there was a company named Google. Google was king of the heap in all things. Google Reader was my primary jumping off point for the web, GMail ran my social graph and was my primary communications tool, and I was proud of my early access to Google Voice.

What a difference three years makes. When I was assembling the facts that eventually broke the Nexus One story back in 2007 (yes, that was me), there was also some talk about how the gPhone (which we now call Android and the Nexus One) was going to be the keystone in an effort to unify the world’s social graphs. The operating theory at Google at the time was that there is nothing more primal a measure of what exists within an Internet users’ social graph than their email. Many would argue that it’s still the primary form of written communication on the Internet still today, although there are more who would disagree with that now than ever before.

And thus Google felt that it had a handle on creating an uber-transparent social network much more so than any young pipsqueak upstart like MySpace and Facebook (and certainly Twitter). That isn’t to indicate that they were complacent, as they seemed very fired up about this idea even at high levels of the company. In late 2007, Google did indeed have a secret high level meeting, where they talked about how to “out-open Facebook,” and GMail and other ways of measuring the social graph was high on the list. There was talk of open APIs, talk of improved contact management, and talk of true integration of all the suites of Google tools with one another.

My personal contacts gave me information that came out of that meeting as well.  The two watch-phrases I heard were: “email is the ultimate measure of social graph,” and “the only way for Google to grow marketshare is to grow the Web, and to do so through social initiatives.”

What happened, Google?

Look, I still use Google Reader as my primary jumping off point for the web, but it’s highly complemented by tools like Twitter and Facebook for content discovery.  I was an early social media adopter, so my usage of Google as a search engine in 2007 was already highly diminished, but my usage of the search engine is, today, decidedly supplementary, not primary as it was in years prior to the advent of social.

Who handles my primary contact management?  That’s a responsibility handled jointly by Facebook and Twitter, with help from Plaxo. When it comes to Google, sure, they have the data to aggregate the important bits of my social graph. Do they have the interface? Not by a longshot.

In Google Reader, one of the least social of all my social media tools, I have a friend named Richard Schwarting, a computer scientist and avid post-sharer. Last night he shared with me the culmination of his frustration with Google and their social initiative in the form of a Get Satisfaction thread:

“Yay for Google Contacts! Now tell us whether to "just wait" on greader issues, or what: getsatisfaction.com/google_contacts doesn’t exist, even though google.com/contacts does. I realize the service is in BETA, but google reader users with issues about relationship mgmt vis-a-vis google contacts are left reading tea leaves.”

There were around 11 people who ‘had the same problem,’ including one who said: “The same is here. It’s very frustrating. I actually nearly gave up on GReader contacts.”

It’s a small and esoteric group of people, we Google Reader fanatics. I get that. It’s indicative of a much larger problem at Google, though. There were a half a dozen points along the way where Google could have certainly quashed the uprising of startups like Twitter and Facebook and never did. They didn’t see the future in them. Only when the social media revolution was well under way did they realize that they held the keys to everyone’s social graph data, and got ‘serious’ about getting something done.

Except nearly nothing ever did get done.

Google’s Social Media Endeavors Have Been Nothing Short of Disastrous

I’ve heard more than a few times said out loud that “YouTube is the world’s second largest social network.” The metric that I think they all seem to be going by is that they’re picking one of the few global website ranking lists, looking at social networks in the top 25 or so, and being all clever with their response, since we all know that while YouTube is primarily a video sharing website, it does have some social features within the site.

If you want to end the post here and call that a victory for Google, go ahead and stop reading now and proceed to the bottom of the post where you can flame-war me. If you want an abbreviated history of Google’s social initiatives, read on.

I’m starting in 2006, since there were many social tools introduced prior to that but mostly took the form of basic utilities, like Blogger and GMail.

In March 2006, Google acquired Writely, which later became the foundation for Google Docs. Google Docs relies on Google Contacts for all it’s social features.

In April 2006, Google launched Google Calendar, a collaborative tool for managing your dates.  Google Calendar relies on Google Contacts for all it’s social features.

In June 2006, Google launched Picasa Web Albums, an online photo suite. Guess what it relies on for all it’s social features.

In November of 2007, Google launched OpenSocial, a “a set of common APIs for developers to build applications for social networks.”  Interestingly, OpenSocial did not (and to the best of my understanding, still doesn’t) have hooks for messaging or communication between social networks, which is more or less integral to being social, I’d normally say.

In May 2008, Google previews Google Friend Connect, which doesn’t actually rely on Google Contacts for it’s social graph data. It instead asks the users and site owners to get everyone to re-create their social graph data for no other purpose than to display some icons on each website the widget resides.

In February 2009, Google created a Twitter account, and officially gave up on being social.

Other things not listed that runs off of this: Google Voice (I think, it bears a striking similarity to my Google Contacts list, but there’s some splintering there), Google Profile, Google FriendConnect (somehow), Google Wave and Google Chat.

Look, I’m a Google fanboy. If Google disappears, my digital life is gone.  I criticize because I love. But I don’t think you understand how bad this problem is without a visual aide.

This is the extent of the social graph management that Google gives me:

 
I can’t count on this. It’s clunky and difficult to manage. There’s no way to automate the updating of my contacts. Sometimes, folks randomly drop off my GChat interface for no particular reason, and I must re-add them, even when they’ve continued to exist within my Google Contacts database. There continues to be a problem with emailing Google Reader posts to friends that I can’t determine the reason for – the auto-complete feature only works for a small subset of my Google Reader contacts, and I can’t determine why.

Updated list: Here’s some more easily implemented ideas that could run off contacts to enhance social features that don’t exist.

– There’s no status streams for my contacts. I can update my status with GChat and in a number of other places, but there’s no way to easily browse the status updates of my friends.

– For that matter, there’ no lifestreaming (something easily implemented). They could have been Friendfeed when Google FriendConnect came out. Friendfeed and Twitter (and now what the center of focus is for Facebook). Still no answer to that, though. Google Profiles combined with GChat and Contacts all look like the hooks exist for all of this, but still no go.

This is no way to be social, Google. You’re the biggest and best tech company out there, I think few could argue with that just simply based off the empirical evidence.

Why can’t you understand the social web?