Google Shared Stuff to Be Discontinued

Google Shared Stuff, the social bookmarking service that has never been officially launched, will no longer be available after the end of March.

Google Shared Stuff was only used to share videos at Google Video and Knol articles, but it was buggy and underdeveloped. Shared Stuff combined different ways to share pages with other people: by email, using social sites like del.icio.us or by adding them to a public page.


As usually, Google's suggestions for replacing the discontinued services are hilarious:

"If you want another way to share videos, you can use the "Share" link below each YouTube video. You can also create a public Google Site if you want to share websites and links with friends."

A more appropriate replacement is Google Reader's sharing bookmarklet, that lets you share content from any web page. There's also AddToAny, which combines multiple sharing options in a crowded page. Many other social sites offer sharing bookmarklets: Facebook, FriendFeed, del.icio.us.

{ Thanks, Jamie. }

Share Personal Information with Your Gmail Contacts

Google Profiles has a new feature that lets you share information about yourself with your contacts. "This information is not public.You control who sees it. Once you've entered your contact information here, you can share it with your friends and family, so they always have the most up-to-date information."

You can add your email addresses, phone numbers, and home address, and allow all your contacts or specific contact groups, like Friends or Family, to see this information on your profile. For some reason, Google doesn't prefill some of the fields like the email address or your Google Talk ID and you can't share the data with contacts that are not part of a group.


It's not clear if the shared data will be used in Gmail, but Microsoft offers a similar feature called Windows Live People that's integrated with Hotmail. "Windows Live People allows real-time updates to contact's information. Suppose one of the user's contacts just moved and has a new home address. When that contact enters their new information in Windows Live People, the user's contact list across Windows Live services is automatically updated in real time."

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

Google Friend Connect, Publicly Available

Google Friend Connect, the service that lets you add social features to a site without writing any code, is now available to everyone. Users don't need to setup a special account for a new site: they can log in using an existing account from Google, Yahoo, AOL or using an OpenID. They can also import a profile and the list of friends from a social network, but the only options are Google Talk, orkut and LinkedIn.

Google provides some basic gadgets that allow users to interact with a site: the members gadget that lists some of the people who joined the site, the wall gadget that lets you post general comments about the site and the review gadget, which associates the comments with an item from site (a blog post, a video). Friend Connect also supports OpenSocial gadgets, but there's no official directory of gadgets.

Google's new service is not yet a good way to build a community because it doesn't integrate with a site. You can only customize the appearance of a gadget, but you can't integrate your existing commenting system with Friend Connect or gain access to in-depth stats about your members.

You need to upload two files for RPC relay and canvas view, which is not always possible if you use a hosted blog service. Fortunately, Blogger already has the two files, so it's even easier to setup Friend Connect.

I added the members gadget and the wall, where you can post comments and links to YouTube videos:

Here's a short video that explains how to use Friend Connect:

Contact Forms in Google Profiles

If you enable "Allow people to contact me through my profile (without showing my email address)" in your Google Profile, people who find your profile can contact you. Google provides a contact form that sends all the messages to your main email address. "We've set some limits on how often messages can be sent and received, and you can disable the feature at any time by editing your profile and deselecting the checkbox," explains Google.


At the bottom of the email, Google shows an explanation:

"This message was sent to you from your Google profile. The sender does not have your email address. If you no longer wish to receive messages from your Google profile, you may edit your settings at http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/me/editprofile".

{ via GoogleWatchBlog }

Google Profile Search

You can now search Google profiles to find people who entered some information about themselves in their public pages. Google shows a thumbnail and a snippet from the profile, but you can't restrict the results to a certain location or to people who worked for a certain company.


To make your profile more findable, Google recommends to "add information about yourself on your profile so people can find you when they search by keywords associated with your profile. For example, include details such as the name of your hometown, your job title, where you work or go to school". In addition to this specialized search engine, profiles can be indexed by any search engine and Google makes this easier.

Yahoo has recently updated user profiles to make them more social. "Yahoo! Profiles is a centralized control panel that lets you manage your identity, activities, interests, and connections across Yahoo! — and eventually the entire Web."

The next challenge is creating an universal profile attached to a digital identity that gathers and filters all your disparate activities from the web. The move towards OpenID, OAuth, the integration of OpenSocial in Google's properties, the launch of FriendConnect are pieces from the same puzzle.

{ via Google Blogoscoped }

Blogger Followers, a New Social Application

Blogger has recently released a feature that lets you publicly subscribe to other blogs. Google calls this "following" and you can only follow blogs powered by Blogger, at least for now.

"Do you have a favorite blog and want to let the author and readers know that you are a fan? Well now you can do that and more with the Blogger Following feature," explains the help center.

Bloggers can add a widget that lists the people who follow a blog. Visitors can follow a blog from the widget and see their subscriptions in Blogger's dashboard or in Google Reader.


In most feed readers, subscribing to a feed is an anonymous action and the only public information is the total number of subscribers. The new Blogger feature indirectly adds public subscriptions to Google Reader.

Googler John Panzer has more details about the next steps:

"The Followers gadget lets you surf the network of people who read and interact with blogs. Just click on any of the followers and you'll go to their profile. For now, that profile is just their Blogger profile page with the blogs they own... but down the road, we'll also be integrated with Friend Connect. Which will open up this network further, in a couple of ways: A non-Blogger site can add a Friend Connect gadget to show the people following it; and you can filter the followers of a blog to show only the friends you already have on your favorite social network. Which you can view as extending your social network out into the blogosphere, or as the blogosphere incorporating all social networks -- take your pick. Of course all of this is based on OpenSocial, so anyone will be able to add gadgets and talk the OpenSocial protocol to access, with user permission, all of this network data and do new and interesting things on top of it. This represents a natural evolution of the loosely joined, standards-based pieces that have always characterized blogging."

The "followers" feature is not yet available for all Blogger users, but you can enable it by following a blog. The address is:

http://www.blogger.com/follow-blog.g?blogID=<BLOGID> (e.g: follow Google OS).

There are two options: follow the blog publicly and appear in the list of subscribers or subscribe anonymously. In both cases, the blog will appear in Blogger's dashboard and in a read-only Google Reader folder
that can be hidden in the settings.


Instead of building a social network like MyBlogLog, Google creates an application on top of other social networks. Incidentally, the application is first tested for blogger.com, but a future Google Reader API and the migration to OpenSocial/FriendConnect will make it look more interesting.

Google Suggests Sites for Your Profile

Google started to use the Social Graph API to suggest links that can be added to your public Google Profile. If you add links to sites that are connected to other sites using FOAF or the XFN microformat, Google makes it easy to import all the links. For example, if you have an account at FriendFeed, add a link to your FriendFeed page to import the sites you shared: videos uploaded at YouTube, Google Reader shared items, del.ico.us bookmarks etc.


Google's unified profiles are slowly added to all Google services that allow user-generated content. "A Google Profile is simply how you represent yourself on Google products — it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you're all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you'd like," explains Google. For now, the profiles are displayed next to the list of shared items from Google Reader, in the Google Books library and next to the custom maps, reviews and edits from Google Maps.

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

Lively (Google's 3D Chat Rooms)

Google's Niniane Wang, who previously worked on rendering clouds, rain and snow for Microsoft Flight Simulator, realized that text comments are pretty boring. "A while ago, I looked around the social web and wished that it could be less static. Sure, you can leave a comment on a blog or write a text blurb on your social networking profile. But what if you want to express yourself in a more fun way, with 3D graphics and real-time avatar interactions?" explains Niniane.

That's how Lively started and we first heard about it last year, when it was tested by some students from ASU. At that time I associated the project with Google Earth, but there's no connection with this application for now.


Lively's goal is to help people "express [themselves] with and without words, and to do this in the places [they] already visit on the web." You can create rooms, decorate them, choose avatars and interact with other people from the room using words or actions. Each room has a permalink and can be embedded in a web page.

To use Lively, you need to download a client that only works in Windows XP/Vista and has plug-ins for Firefox and IE, log in to a Google account and get a Lively ID (Google recommends to choose something different from your Google username). Then you can choose a name and an avatar that can be customized later.


Lively's client also includes support for Google Desktop gadgets and developers can create their own objects with custom interactions.

Many people compared Lively with Second Life and IMVU. "In 2005, [Google] made a secret bid to buy IMVU. The company turned Google down. The search giant did manage to hire one of IMVU's five founders, Mel Guymon," writes Venture Beat. Mel Guymon, who is now Google's Head of 3D Operations, says that "Google making a play validates the space like no one else. We're basically saying this is a real space and everyone is doing this. (...) The implementation of it takes the best of the space, rich avatars and a large catalog of virtual goods, which by the way is free, and have it be a part of your existing social network, which is the big wave right now. That's really the silver bullet."


Lively has the potential to attract some of the people that use social networks and want a fun way to express themselves, but having to download a client that uses a lot of resources, slows down your computer and crashes often is a big downside.

Related:
Google's Lively social 3D world is 20 percent done
Google Lively FAQ

Google Talk as a Social Network

I know it seems hard to believe, but your Google Talk contacts will become... your Google Friends. Everything started last year with an innocent addition to Google Reader: automatically broadcasting your shared items to your friends. If you use Google Reader, you probably noticed that you're subscribed to the shared items from your Google Talk contacts. Many complained that their Google Talk contact list includes many people that are not necessarily friends. "I have business contacts, school contacts, family contacts, etc., and not only do I not really have any interest in seeing all of their feed information, I don't want them seeing mine either," explained a Google Reader user.


But how does someone become your friend in Google Talk? You can send or accept an invitation, but there's another option enabled by default: "Gmail automatically determines which contacts you'll be able to talk to without having to invite each other," based on how frequently you mail each other. And since Gmail contacts include all the people you've ever replied to, you'll end up with a new Google Talk friend after replying 2-3 times to someone's messages.

Here's a screenshot from the recently launched Google Friend Connect, a service that brings social features to ordinary web sites. As you can see, Google Talk is listed next to Facebook, orkut and hi5.


The invisible social network needed a way to expose information about its users, so you can now create a Google Profile. There's even a shortcut for accessing your profile: http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/me.

But without a place where you can share interesting stuff with your friends, Google Talk would be just a virtual social network. iGoogle, the site where you can aggregate all the things you find important, will become Google's main social site when the new version of iGoogle will be released. Among other features, the new iGoogle will add a Google Talk widget, support for OpenSocial applications and a gadget that shows updates from your friends. iGoogle's gadgets and presumably some Google services will be able to push updates to an activity stream that will be shared with your friends, which happen to be the Google Talk contacts. That means your GTalk contacts will be informed when you share a post in Google Reader, when you upload photos in Picasa Web Albums or post a review in Google Maps.


This is actually the Maka-Maka project revealed last year in a confidential Google video that has been accidentally published. "The new central place for social activities will create feeds for all or your events (activity streams) and share them with your contacts," I mentioned in that post.

That means Google Reader's sharing feature was just a rehearsal for a much bigger release that will make the hidden Google Talk social network more visible.

Google Tests the New iGoogle

Announced in April, the new version of iGoogle that brings social applications is tested in a small number of randomly selected Google accounts.

The new iGoogle places the tabs on the left-hand side of the page and you can expand the tabs to see the list of gadgets and status information, like the number of unread Gmail messages. There's a new chat feature borrowed from Gmail that lets you chat with your contacts while visiting iGoogle - that means iGoogle gets a sense of presence because you'll know when your contacts are online. Since the chat feature will be enabled by default, it's obvious that Google will be able to add options for sharing items and discussing posts with the contacts that are online.

iGoogle also adds a list of updates from your contacts similar to Facebook's newsfeed: you can see stories shared by your contacts in Google Reader, recent photos uploaded to Picasa Web Albums, Google Talk status messages, shared iGoogle themes and gadgets.


Another change is that gadgets have an expanded interface, called canvas view. Gadgets authors will take advantage of this to display more information and make their gadgets more interactive, while your feeds can be read in a Google Reader-like interface. In the future, iGoogle will support OpenSocial applications and the transformation to a social site will be complete.

Google announced that the canvas view will be rolled out to a small percentage of users this month and to more users in July, while the OpenSocial applications "will not work in production until later this summer".

Update (Oct. 16): The new iGoogle has been launched.

Spreading OpenSocial Across the Web

Any web site can be a container for OpenSocial, any web site can add social features even if it's not a social network - that seems to be the idea behind Friend Connect, a new piece from Google's social puzzle. Friend Connect will allow the users of a site to add profiles, to import their friends from other social networks, to use social applications in the context of a site.

Paul Buchheit wrote last year that "there's no such thing as a social network". The social aspect of a site is just one of its many features. "Real products need more functionality in order to somehow deliver value to their users. It is this other functionality that defines the real purpose of a product, not the social network, which exists only to enable or enhance the core purpose."

Friend Connect is an enabler for making web sites more social, since the barrier to entry is really low. "First, many website owners want to add features that enable their visitors to do things with their friends, but the technology and resource hurdles have been too high. Second, people are tiring of needing to create new logins and profiles and recreate their friends lists wherever they go on the web." Google will use OpenID or Google Accounts for authentication, OAuth or APIs like Facebook Connect, MySpace Data Availability to find your friends from other social networks and OpenSocial gadgets to interact with your friends.

"Social is in the air. It's the blossoming of a lot of work by a lot of people. We don't move in lockstep and don't need to. We converge on interoperable technology. There's more than one way to connect a site to the social Web. With Friend Connect, we're confident it's a good step forward. I'm sure there will be more ways to do that than what Friend Connect does. We wanted to start with easiest and safest starting point," said Google's David Glazer in a conference call.

A preview of Friend Connect will be available later today at http://www.google.com/friendconnect (update: the page is live) and the service should be launched in a couple of months.

Google's New Social Network: iGoogle

The Google-owned social network orkut, while extremely popular in Brazil and India, has failed to find similar success in the US. With the launch of OpenSocial, an API for writing social gadgets, it was clear that iGoogle will play an important role in Google's second attempt to socialize. After all, OpenSocial applications are iGoogle gadgets with a social component.

Following orkut's model, iGoogle opened a sandbox for developers who write OpenSocial gadgets. The sandbox is probably a test for the next iteration of iGoogle: the personalized homepage turned into a social network. "The integration of OpenSocial with gadgets gives you an opportunity to enhance your content for users by incorporating social features. For example, a books gadget could display what a user's friends are reading, allow users to request to borrow books from friends' libraries, and show users books that their friends recently rated. As users share content with their friends, your gadget will naturally build a broad audience for distributing content and driving traffic," explains the new developer site for iGoogle gadgets.

iGoogle has tens of million of users, 50% of the users are from the US and it was one of the fastest growing Google products in 2006 and 2007. It's also the homepage for many Google users who want to personalize their experience by adding a theme and fresh information from the web. The new social component will not affect all the gadgets, so you'll still have gadgets for mail, weather or news, but some of the gadgets could share information with your friends. There's also a new canvas view that will show an expanded version of the gadgets, an integration with Google profiles and a newsfeed that shows your friends' recent activities.

Hopefully, the social component of iGoogle won't be too prominently promoted and people will be able to continue using the personalized homepage without dealing with friend invitations and viral gadgets. iGoogle will try to be the social connection between Google services, but this is a difficult mission for Google, a company that has never managed to build a successful social site.

Related:
iGoogle Gadget Maker
Google intends to integrate its social applications
Google to open up its social platform