Google arms itself to take on social networking.
There is an increasing drumbeat among technology analysts that Facebook is heading towards oblivion, not in days, or even months, but certainly in the next couple of years. If this seems a perverse judgment in the face of its claim to a virtual society, half a billion people strong, its underlying logic is compellingly Darwinian: The mobile web rewards increasing simplicity, and it doesn't make sense, in the long run, to have multiple social networks, each with their own sign-ins and passwords, their own assemblies of non-collaborating address books, applications, and data, and multiple levels of interaction with other users.This social multiverse may be manageable on a desktop or laptop, but a multiplicity of structures for similar personal information and interaction are potentially overwhelming on a mobile device. For example, the average European mobile user has four separate address books, according to a 2009 survey by Critical Path, and he or she is a) frustrated about updating them, and b) enthusiastic about the idea of being able to syncronize all of them.So it's not surprising that mobile network operators have realized that there's a need for aggregation and syncronization--and therefore an opportunity to monetize, albeit in a limited sense, social networking on the mobile Web. Orange's Social Life, for example, allows simultaneous posting across different networks, while Vodafone 360 is able to sync contacts between the phone, Facebook, Windows Live Messenger and Google Talk. But why stop the evolution there--why not fully integrate everything in one system that is scalable to meet the luxury of indolence or the demands of business?Whether this is the strategy Google will take, only Google knows; but after abandoning Buzz and Wave, it is clearly going after Facebookwith more and better firepower, by simply buying into or buying better mobile Internet arms suppliers. Its recent shopping splurge has led to investments in social games maker Zynga in July; the acquisition of Slide, a maker of Facebook apps in early August; and, last week, the purchase of Jambool, which runs virtual currency systems for social games. As Augie Ray of Forrester Research told the Financial Times, "We are going to see a more cohesive, confident and sensible social push from Google in the coming months."For the moment, Facebook is the top mobile social network destination, especially among young people. But young people are fickle (seeMySpace); and while time is on their and Facebook's side (in terms of updating), the reality, as one social media expert/technology veteran put it to me, is that Facebook is "something for non-productive people to engage in." If you're actually busy, maintaining the site is simply too much work. Anything that can deliver the useful essence of Facebook without the effort has a distinct advantage; the problem for Facebook is that, for all the redesigns it imposes on its users, it is not designed specifically for the mobile Web. Google, by contrast, has an elegant e-mail and location system, a good instant chat system, and an as-yet unbeatable search engine. Imagine if it organized your Facebook content better than Facebook.Google's salient strength is aesthetics. "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music," wrote Walter Pater in The Renaissance, a collection of criticism that scandalized Oxford in the 1870s by its apparent advocacy of sensualism and momentariness. Pater, whom W.B. Yeats described as one of his key philosophical influences, and who was the inspiration for a generation of dandies, including Oscar Wilde, argued that music, when it was successful, obliterated the distinction between form and content. It may be grandiose to call the mobile Web an art, but it seems reasonable to suggest that the technologies that will succeed will be those that reframe the current relationship between form and content into something intuitive, immediate and scalable
So what does this mean for the news industry? If your mobile Web strategy does not have equal space at the management table, you better make space for it and quick. You need to be adapting your story and editorial decision-making for the mobile Internet. You need to hedge your bets on Facebook by partnering with a variety of social media. And you need to be thinking about how other kinds of partnerships can push your mobile presence.
As Pater said of life, there is an "awful brevity" to technology.
As Pater said of life, there is an "awful brevity" to technology.
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