Blogging

Google is apparently “getting ready to fully cast its social net over its web properties,” according to TechCrunch, the latest signal being the automatic creation of a Google account when opening a YouTube account.

It’s a clever, almost Microsoft-esque move designed to make Google the center of our social universe. It can’t happen fast enough. But Google shouldn’t stop with its own properties.

The social Web is currently a morass of mostly siloed choices. I can be on Facebook but also have to build a profile on LinkedIn, not to mention Digg, Slashdot, Bebo, Classmates.com, etc., etc. While we’ve seen marginal linkage start to form between these through initiatives such as OpenSocial, they don’t get nearly far enough toward the one-stop social experience most of us want on the Web.

Yes, choice is good, so sometimes we assume a dizzying array of choices must be very good. Not so.

As I’ve argued before (PDF), what we need is not a myriad of choices but rather a limited, manageable set of quality choices. Markets trend toward such choice naturally by eliminating weak players and elevating strong competitors.

This is as it should be.

Fearful as I am of any one vendor controlling my Web experience, as Microsoft did for decades in desktop computing, I’m almost equally fearful of a disjointed Web experience that never really hits its stride because users are hamstrung among different social Web sites.

I want the Web to be just that: a connecting web, not an isolating one.

So, dominate me, Google. You’ve been a good steward of data and user experience thus far, albeit not without hiccups. Find some way to pull in my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social data to my Google profile. Just ask: I’ll give it to you. I have better things to do than waste time schlepping between different social Web sites. Save me the bother.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Source:
Dominate me, Google. Please

Twitter Search will become a lot more useful soon, the microblogging site’s new vice president of operations said Wednesday night.

Santosh Jayaram, who until recently was vice president of search quality for Google, was on a panel I was moderating in the evening. During the panel and later in a one-on-one discussion, Jayaram confirmed that Twitter Search, which currently searches only the text of Twitter posts, will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages.

Santosh Jayaram, Twitter vice president

(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET)

This will make Twitter Search a much more complete index of what’s happening in real time on the Web and make it an even more credible competitor to Google Search for people looking for very timely content.

Twitter Search will also get a “reputation” ranking system soon, Jayaram told me. When you do a search on a “trending” topic–a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar–Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank the search results in part based on that.

Jayaram did not say precisely how reputation will be calculated; he indicated that engineers are still figuring that out. But this, again, will make Twitter Search more valuable.

Currently, if you search for a hot topic on Twitter, the results may be swamped by re-tweets and low-value content from hundreds or thousands of other users. A ranking system will help a great deal. See “Twitter search is broken” and “Three start-ups attack Twitter Search.”

I’m looking forward to these changes.

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Also, here is a real-time search story from Jayaram, which he used to illustrate the immediacy of Twitter Search during the panel discussion. He told of being in the Twitter offices in San Francisco on March 30, when the Twitter engineers noticed that the word “earthquake” had suddenly started trending up. They didn’t know where the earthquake was.

Several seconds later, their building started to shake. The earthquake had been in Morgan Hill, 60 miles south of San Francisco, and the tweets about the shaker reached the office faster than the seismic waves themselves.

Twitter Search to dive deeper, rank results