Google Reader – Evolve As Competitor To Facebook?
Google Reader continues to become more critical to me as a hub for consuming and sharing/republishing content from the Social Web (which basically spans all of the web these days). Some recent interesting new features are outlined in this brief post on the Google Reader Blog:
http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2009/08/flurry-of-features-for-feed-readers.html
What would happen if a “Google Writer” existed?
No, not this Google Writer 
. Rather, a new application to add to the Google Suite that handles all your publishing needs. Whether that be short microblogging bursts or long blog posts. They have tools of course. Blogger.com and Jaiku come to mind. And of course they have gmail. But Google could benefit from some more cohesion of functionality giving users a single point of entry. In other words, Google has too many separate projects and they need to unite the best and most applicable to most of the users. It’s not easy of course. Especially when you a re a company that buys up smaller companies or that is so large and has so many teams working on so many different projects that it becomes very difficult to merge the plethora of gems into a few shiny offerings that people can grok immediately.
This is why Facebook has sped ahead of the rest and is right in Google’s face now.
But Facebook also suffers from bloating too many ideas into a single UI. It’s the opposite problem that Google has.
The other extreme is exemplified by twitter and it’s adoption of simplicity for the first few years of it’s existence. This simplicity caught on. Micro-messages and few features. But it is inevitable that twitter the company will gradually start adding more features and head towards the middle. Meanwhile, MIcroblogging will take continue to take off in a manner akin to email lists… a federated public communication utility.
Friendfeed, a company started by former Google Engineers, offers a service that leverages several other social services and lets users manage the river of content while also allowing the user to publish new content.
Friendfeed also accelerated the focus on Vast Real-Time Communication and Search. Facebook often looked to Friendfeed for inspiration and innovation and cloned various features for the Facebook service. Last week, Facebook decided to buy Friendfeed and Friendfeed agreed to join them for the tune of almost $50 million in cash and stock.
This is good for Facebook and Friendfeed (who could not attain mass adoption quickly enough to increase their value and/or derive revenue). It’s good for Facebook users. Not necessarily so great for Friendfeed users as the service will not exist in it’s current form for much longer. But with this reality will come new innovation in a more federated manner.
This brings us to rssCloud and other similar efforts/proposals/protocols for an open federated distributed content network… loosely joined with (near)real-time update notifications.
It was recently umbrella’d by Anil Dash as “The Pushbutton Web“. Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb asked if this was The Perfect Storm forming. The key takeaway points for this focus is removing the single point of failure that centralized services are vulnerable to, data ownership and the simple value in having confidence as a content publisher/consumer that what you do, how you do it and where you do it won’t ever be interrupted by business decisions made by a selct group of people in charge of it all.
If we are approaching a DIY Revolution, then the tinkering we are seeing will surely lead to new meaningful innovation. If nothing else, what has been learned can be leveraged and a balance will be maintained between the walled gardens and the freedom of using the open internet as it was intended to be used. We may have a modern day version of the AOL from yesteryear – Facebook – but coexisting with this will hopefully be a mycelia effect where hundreds and thousands of nodes on the vast network will work together to make new forms of mass communication and data sharing feasible…. just like email. In fact, email is not dead and we’re going to see more emphasis on this fact soon.
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