Paul Adams is in charge of the User Research for Social team at Google. A month or so ago he made a presentation in which he outlined his research into how peoples real life social networks compare with their online social networks. As he currently works on Google Buzz and YouTube and is most likely involved in work on Google Me (or whatever it ends up being called (hopefully not this)), it is a safe bet that this is part of the thinking and the research that is going on, to design their new Facebook rival social network.
In this presentation he demonstrates how he has found a number of flaws in Facebook’s social strategy. He highlights how Facebook’s unrefined approach to ‘Friends’, limits users. People typically have multiple groups of unrelated friends to whom they might want to display different types of information. Facebook only offers one all-encompassing 'friend' pile. The design of an online social network should reflect that of your offline one; with a user able to communicate in different ways and with different faces to their individual sections of ‘friends’.
The presentation is a nice breakdown of how modern social networking relationships work and sticks to a sociological approach without getting into any techy stuff. The real message here is that current social networks i.e. Facebook (and of course Orkut, which he doesn’t mention) don’t quite meet the needs of its users. If Google learns from this presentation then we can look forward to their social network including:
- Better management of your ‘friend’ groups
- Even easier defined privacy settings
- A focus on separating close friends from acquaintances
- Our social networking will have an increasingly strong effect on advertising (and SEO)
Have a look through the presentation, it’s full of great stats and will make you think about your own social networking life and how it compares to your real social life. Plus it’s quite funny.
In other news…
The latest news is in fact about Google Voice, and how Google users in the US can now make free phone calls from their Gmail accounts. This sounds pretty cool and there will even be UK style red phone boxes popping up in airports and at universities in the US to promote the feature, from which people can have a go at making a calls. (More news to come if and when it gets a launch date in the UK.) Here’s a nice video which (sort of) shows it in action.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp9iug7fSiw&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
- Search The Human Body With Google Body Browser - December 21, 2010
- Has This Site Been Hacked? - December 20, 2010
- How Do Twitter & Facebook’s 2010 Trends Compare With Google’s? - December 14, 2010
- Google Zeitgeist 2010: What Have You Been Searching For Planet Earth? - December 10, 2010
- Google Chrome Gets Store And Talks Chrome OS - December 8, 2010
- Google Issues Security Email For Website Optimiser - December 7, 2010
- Google Launches AdWords Global Market Finder - December 7, 2010
- New Android Phone Promises A Pure Experience - December 7, 2010
- Google AdWords Wants Your Products! - December 3, 2010
- Know How Mobile Internet Affects Your Website? Google Analytics does… - December 2, 2010
You may also be interested in:
- What Will Facebook Email Mean For Google? Another Facebook cannonball in the side of Google's fortress... ...
- Facebook – The Movie Social Networking making it to the big screen? ...
- Facebook Like will never replace Google Link Facebook trying to be a search engine and Google trying to start a social network. Are they mad? ...
- Facebook Take Over Websites… In a Good Way! Facebook now has a range of social networking plug-ins which you can slap onto your own website with just one...
- Festive Facebookers Buck Googles Dominance While Google maintained itself as the most visited site for 364 days last year, Facebook managed to step up on...
Cozy Digital is an