Improving Google's Social Network
Google already has a social network (orkut), but it's only popular in Brazil and India, doesn't have a Googlish interface and had a lot of security problems in the past. That's why last year Google sponsored a project at the Carnegie Mellon University's …
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2007 Google owns a social network it cannot use at home: Orkut has never translated beyond Brazil and India, carries a record of security lapses, and lacks what the Google Operating System blog calls a Googlish interface. Rather than rebuild it internally, Google has sponsored a Carnegie Mellon University project aimed at improving its social networking efforts — outsourcing part of the fix to academia.
The story traveled: TechCrunch picked it up the same day under a frame that widened the stakes considerably, reporting that Google and Yahoo were both working on next-generation social networks. That reframes the CMU sponsorship from a patch job on a regional property to one move in a broader contest between the two largest portal companies.
First-order effects
- Google gains an external research pipeline for fixing Orkut's interface and security gaps, whose reach has stayed confined mainly to Brazil and India.
- TechCrunch's same-day report that Yahoo is also pursuing a next-generation social network puts the two portals in direct competition for the same social audience.
Second-order effects
- Yahoo's parallel effort raises the stakes on the Carnegie Mellon work: Google now needs the project to yield something shippable, not just exploratory, if it is to hold ground in social.
- Orkut's Brazil- and India-heavy user base becomes Google's only existing distribution foothold in social networking, increasing the strategic value of those markets relative to its home turf.
Third-order effects
- If incumbent portals keep trying to retrofit social capabilities through sponsored academic research rather than organic product development, university projects become a standard procurement channel for missing product DNA — a pattern whose durability depends on whether the CMU work produces anything deployable.
The trend: Web portals facing a social networking gap are turning to sponsored university research to acquire capabilities their own organizations have not produced natively.