Google musings

Google is striking deep into the walled garden territory with its latest offering - its new Groups version 2 Beta platform seems to be a direct challenge to community stalwarts Yahoo! Groups and MSN Groups.

The new service seeks to differentiate itself from competitors by integrating its original form, a product of search technology and acquired USENET provider DejaNews, together with user-controlled discussion platform capabilities.

This is a logical extension of its content acquisition strategy that assimilated Blogger, and Google consequently obtained a wellspring of content that stems from the blogging phenomenom. What better content to collect than the content your own users show interest in creating?

Google's strategy is elegant, and at the same time terrifying for its competitors. The only real currency in the online space at this time is users. Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and other major portals have worked tirelessly to build their "walled gardens" - attempting to keep their users in their own sphere of control as far as possible by providing as much relevant content as possible. Yet, frighteningly, a service that directs its users ever out of its own domain is instead growing, and growing strong, in that same measure of wealth.

With the introduction of the new GMail service, and consequently being able to tag users with a persistent identifier, it seems like natural progression to develop more community applications to further personalize the Google experience.

Unifying Google's user applications would be the next logical step. Blogger, Groups, GMail and Orkut are currently separate entities, at least from an identifiable-user perspective - each system requires its own account authentication. Bringing them all together under one single login has its own implications, but should not be viewed as being too different from what the other major portals are already doing, and I believe both the company and users will stand to benefit.

Orkut appears to be the bastard child in the stable right now - as a concept and technology, fascinating; but its value seems to be limited unless user relationships can be integrated with other services that will benefit from community/friend-friend interaction.

Google's brain trust appears to be paying dividends. Secretive? Who cares? I'm eager to see what this company has in store for us in the future; hopefully being listed on the public market will not kill its innovative streak.