news analysis In the social-networking party sweeping the Web, search titan Google is playing the wallflower. Is it being smart or just plain nerdy?
MySpace.com, Facebook.com and others have turned heads for their skyrocketing traffic and massive appeal among young people, who flock to the sites by the millions to bond via photos, videos, blogs, e-mail and instant messaging. Meanwhile, top portals MSN and Yahoo, threatened by the prospect of losing favoured-site ranking to MySpace, have begun to organise their applications around social networking, as well.
But Google's 2-year-old social network Orkut -- which connects friends and friends of friends around shared interests, but does not include blogging or video features -- has lagged in the popularity contest. It's still not widely available and has yet to adopt the Google brand. "It proved to be a problem for Google so now they're watching it," said Stephen Arnold, author of "The Google Legacy", referring to accusations that Orkut members promoted gang-related violence in countries like Brazil.
-- Esther Dyson, editor, Release 1.0
But as Google takes time to tinker with another one of its many young services, competitors are fast encroaching on the company's other turf.
Blogger, for example, was the Web's top blog-publishing tool when Google bought it in February 2003. Although Google hasn't turned the service into a full-on social network, Nielsen/NetRatings considers blogging a social activity.
In the last year, MySpace, which lets members include blogs on their personal pages, surpassed Google's Blogger as the top social-networking site by Nielsen's measure in the United States. In May 2006, Blogger had 20 million unique visitors, up 67 percent from May 2005. In contrast, MySpace drew 42 million unique visitors in May, up 329 percent from the same period a year ago, according to Nielsen.
Orkut fell below Nielsen's reporting cutoff at roughly 300,000 unique visitors.
According to Google, which responded via e-mail, the company is "committed" to social networking through Blogger, Google Video and Orkut. "Where it makes sense, Google continues to integrate its products to provide the best user experience possible, as with Gmail and Google Talk, for example," according to an unnamed spokesperson.
Of course, some proponents say Google is savvy not to invest heavily in services that have questionable benefit to its search and advertising business, which is worth near US$6 billion annually. What's more likely, they say, is that Google will invest in technologies that can improve Web search and its rate of return on advertising "clicks."
"Fundamentally, information, not people, is Google's forte," said Esther Dyson, editor of tech newsletter Release 1.0, which is owned by CNET Networks, publisher of CNET News.com and CNET.com.au. "It will be interesting over time to see how close Google can come to understanding people through algorithms," she added.
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