Google To Unveil Broad New Social Product Tomorrow
Michael Arrington
Feb 8, 2010

Google is planning to unveil a broad new social product on Tuesday that will integrate with at least two existing Google products. Some details emerged earlier today on the Wall Street Journal (“a new feature that makes it easier and faster for users of Gmail to view media and status updates”), but our understanding is that the product goes well beyond a Gmail integration.

As I wrote last night, there is still a lot of room for improvement in online social services. Status updates, photo and video sharing, review and location based content are not only decentralized today, but are becoming overwhelmed with spam and other noise.

The Google event begins at 10 am. Tune in to TechCrunch for live coverage.

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  • saady

    Go Big G (Y)

  • http://www.coolthings.com Cool Things

    I am guessing Google has totally realized that Facebook is not going to make a deal with it.
    So all new inventions are going to focus on Facebook feature attack for a while.

    But you never know, like David Letterman, Leno and Oprah in the commercial last night.

  • Gabriel

    Yahoo have already had a very good go at this, but incredibly, they haven’t publicised it at all! Shame cos it works very well.

    http://www.ymailblog.com/blog/2009/12/my-social-networks-app/

  • http://www.developar.com developar

    It is basically a Goog version of Twitter, no need for speculation

  • Patrick

    I wonder if it is going to have anything to do with “Buzz,” the label that is reserved for internal use in gmail
    http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2010-01-31-n18.html

  • marc

    I am assuming it’s PST, but can we get a time-zone?

  • http://anonymousdesigner.tumblr.com/ Anonymous Designer

    Better Google profiles integrations with Gmail? An activity feed on profiles? We can hope…

  • http://www.sachaworld.com Andreas Khoury

    Let’s wait and see

  • http://dahito.com Louis-Pierre Dahito

    Hope it has nothing to do with Google Wave

  • shaff

    mike, those new ad blocks are annoying.
    time to install FF ad block.

  • http://www.jimhanifen.com Jim Hanifen

    Thank you TechCrunch for always giving us live coverage of events. Look forward to hearing what Google is going to do next.

  • http://parislemon.com MG Siegler

    yes, it’s pacific time.

  • Etrigan

    Everybody’s cloning everybody else.

    How about something useful that people actually want, such as making Gtalk integrate with yahoo Messenger and Live Messenger, so you can IM your friends on other networks?

  • http://www.walidmrealtor.com walidmrealtor

    I can’t wait to see what they’ll do next…hopefully more integration of current produccts with a focus on real time data.

  • http://jfrydakis.posterous.com Jason Frydakis

    I remember Gtalk starting with quite a lot of skepticism for being “embedded”. a couple of years later it is now claiming the TOP in my every day contact with friends or colleagues etc.

    So if they manage to introduce something less cluttered that all the rest out there, something similar to plain, embedded Gtalk and of course keep it spam free, I guess it will win a lot of those fed up with all the “group”, fan, apps etc!! :)

    Las

  • igniman

    Mike, i ‘m pretty sure (given the timeliness of your post yesterday) you know a lot more than that. SPIT IT OUT!

  • Michael Arrington

    I’m not talking.

  • Krishna

    I bet this is going to be GOOGLE WAVEEEEEEEEEE

  • http://chicagoareawritingproject.wordpress.com cawptl

    What about Wave? Haven’t heard too much about it for a while.

  • igniman

    why are you not green?

  • sk

    you really want to be in touch with people who still use yahoo or live messenger?

  • igniman

    are you you?

  • http://blogs.atlassian.com/confluence/barconati/ Bill from Atlassian

    SocialWok was positioning themselves as ‘the social layer for Google apps.’ I wonder if Google is acquiring them.

  • mateo2

    Google should stop trying to do social. They don’t get social. They are an algorithmic company. They should stay with what they know.

  • Jeff

    Yeah, green seems to be a little broke :(

  • rh

    I bet they will be unveiling the new gmail which is the ultimate social network.. knows your connections, your dialog, etc.
    especially in light of the fb titan project which is the converse.

  • http://www.shifz.com magnus

    I hope it has everything to do with Wave.

  • CP

    So here are the facts:

    1. M. Arrington gets invited to Google HQ for a product preview.

    2. M. Arrington writes a blog on “Social” is broken and “just waiting for someone to fix it.”

    3. Google announces the “Social Gmail”

    Now do the math: 1+2+3

  • CP

    Its actually Social Search.. Yesterday I saw my friends link in the search results:

    http://www.google.com/s2/search/social#socialcircle

    This is the network of connections Google uses to identify relevant social search results. It is based on a combination of the following:

    * Direct connections from your Google chat buddies and contacts (12)
    * Direct connections from links listed on your Google profile (0) such as Twitter and FriendFeed
    * Secondary connections (17) that are publicly associated with your direct connections

    In addition to web pages from your social circle, posts from your Google Reader subscriptions may also appear in your social search results.

    This is a recent snapshot of your social circle. Changes you make to your connections will be reflected in the next snapshot. Learn more »

    http://www.google.com/s2/search/social#socialcontent

  • http://www.techretold.com shan

    So End of Orkut?

  • ronald

    Let’s see:
    You mostly run over a Googly.
    You make a post which hints something is coming.
    After somebody else who hasn’t been briefed before brakes the news(?), you more or less confirms.

    Should we continue to guess. Nah, it’s just Google, data hints at aggregation with some API’s thrown in. Big deal.

  • http://www.xackr.com Xackr

    Oooh I’m hoping they want to buy my domain name oogleface.com and turn it into a Facebook killer. I’d sell it to them for a mere $50K.

  • Vincent

    Nexus One: google playing catch-up
    Social Feature: google playing catch-up

    We need Google to start innovating again.

  • Moe Glitz

    Wasn’t Google going to rule the Social Networking World a couple of years ago with the launch of OpenSocial. Whatever happened to that ‘Facebook killer’.

    Google Money was gonna kill PayPal.
    GoogleBase was gonna kill eBay.
    Google Lively was gonna kill Second Life.

    Apart from Google Maps & GMail, every other new Google Product always sucks.
    Google Wave looks interesting, if it can sort out what it wants to be.
    Google Wave is a bit like the new iPad, looking to be something for people that are unsure if they really need it.
    Is Google Wave a new email, messenger or Wiki product?

    Whatever new Social Product Google launches tomorrow will of course be watched with great interest. But whether or not it has the cool factor to bite into the Facebook and Twitter audiences remains to be seen.

  • http://DNBlogger.com RKB

    Hope it has everything to do with Google-Wave.
    Google-Wave is awesome. I just love it.
    It will be amazingly great if WAVE is part of everything google does.

    Watch out friends! —- WAVE will soon take over the internet world.

    Google WAVE is total solution for managing all of our life: personal life and work life.

    Wave is Social-Collaboration = Social Networking (Facebook/linkedln) + Social Marketing (Twitter)

    Google Wave will be the story of this year and it will change forever how we live and work from this year on.

    Just wait for wave to be rolled out to the public and businesses…….there is a lot of great functionality that google wave team is going to introduce in next few weeks. When that happen, wave will be used and discussed more than anything known to us before.

    In few years time, wave will leave twitter/facebook etc far behind because wave is a total logical solution to do everything, not just bits and pieces of our life.

    Let’s see what happens.

    I am very excited about GOOGLE-WAVE!

  • http://DNBlogger.com RKB

    Hope it has everything to do with Google-Wave.
    Google-Wave is awesome. I just love it.
    It will be amazingly great if WAVE is part of everything google does.

    Watch out friends! —- WAVE will soon take over the internet world.

    Google WAVE is total solution for managing all of our life: personal life and work life.

    Wave is Social-Collaboration = Social Networking (Facebook/linkedln) + Social Marketing (Twitter)

    Google Wave will be the story of this year and it will change forever how we live and work from this year on.

    Just wait for wave to be rolled out to the public and businesses…….there is a lot of great functionality that google wave team is going to introduce in next few weeks. When that happen, wave will be used and discussed more than anything known to us before.

    In few years time, wave will leave twitter/facebook etc far behind because wave is a total logical solution to do everything, not just bits and pieces of our life.

    Let’s see what happens.

    I am very excited about GOOGLE-WAVE!

    Sooner we adopt it, better for us to simplify our life and save time.

  • http://www.blingfactor.com Kenny Berlin

    This sounds like Google is just answering Facebook’s Project Titan (email) stuff. Email and social networks have been on a collision course for awhile. It’s hard to say who is better equipped to be the better combo feature: the current email provider (Google) or the current social networker (facebook). I think I’d rather be in Facebook’s place. 400 million users is really powerful.

  • http://DNBlogger.com RKB

    Google Wave is an all-in-one solution for our daily lives, both personal and work lives. It will simplify our lives and save us time.

    Internet will be fun again if wave is widely used.

    Of course, wave needs to get better and better and google wave team is hard at work making it better all the time.

  • Melanie

    To me this seems a response to Facebook’s new advancements with their e-mail protocol, which I think will definitely dig into a slice of the online messaging pie. I’m exited for this!

  • rjb

    Re: GTalk/Messenger integration. I think everyone outside of Microsoft and Yahoo agrees this would be great, and Google Talk already implements an open & interoperable protocol (XMPP). It’s now up to Yahoo & Microsoft to open up their systems & protocols before this can happen.

  • asdfg

    Orkut is better than Facebook. The only reason I don’t use it personally is because no one else I know does/is even aware of its existence.

  • cachodebestia

    My bet is that they are going to add some sort of Twitter to Gmail

    Gmail is one of their best products, they should keep using it as a base for further improvement. Instead of weird experiments such as Wave (which is an amazing piece of technology, but probably way too many years before its time )

  • igniman

    are you implying that M.Arrington IS Google?

  • nikit phadke

    Hey Mike, Is this the meeting you were going to attend when Giananmen Square happened?

  • SFTitan

    Sergei?

  • http://smonow.com Pat Richardson

    Facebook will still be number one.

  • http://coderocker.com Mauricio

    Google should just worry about releasing a Google Reader app for BlackBerry! But that’s just my opinion. Lol.

  • tileguru

    I’ll probably end up using it more than Facebook. It never occurs to me to log into Facebook, but since I’m on Google for my email all the time I will naturally use it. I view all of these social networking sites as a way to manage my own PR, so I’m careful to fill out the blanks. Will be interesting to see if they can take some critical mass from Facebook. One thing has been proven, which is that people will happily bounce from one of these to the next.

    -Ian
    http://www.ambienoverdose.org

  • Igor

    6?

  • http://www.ignimedia.com igniman

    Google plans to make the web a huge open social application platform, much like facebook’s app ecosystem or facebook connect, but with robust features. Essentially every website will be able to benefit from google’s new viral features.

  • mike

    It’s like watching Microsoft trying to figure out the internet.

  • Mike Butcher

    I wonder if it will be Jaiku?

  • http://www.sriraj.org Sriraj

    If it is any thing like the recent search bar implementation inside Gmail, then that’s not what I’m looking for from Google.

  • http://www.socialwok.com Vikram

    Thanks for keeping us in mind Bill. Socialwok is growing at a rate faster than we expected.

    I guess the demand for a social collaboration platform to tight together Google Apps was huge (Good thing we are powered by Google App Engine).

    We are working hard on and have some big things to release this year. Any news from Google of this type is great news for everyone :)

  • Elena Washington

    LOL. I was thinking the same thing.

  • http://techcrunchies.com Anand Srinivasan

    I guess it has something to do with integrating Orkut to the existing suite of products. Have been noticing a “Bad bad server..No donut for you” message very often in the past few days on the site..Probably something’s cooking..

  • http://techcrunchies.com Anand Srinivasan

    The new “downgraded” comments system makes it difficult to see who’s the real Michael Arrington (or the other TC writers) and who’s a fake.

  • anon

    i think they should make more phones, tablets, and whatever anyone else is doing… they are good at talking about doing those things

  • yeah

    i was reading another arrington tc post and in the comments section he wasn’t green either. i guess they don’t always have their tc colour identifier option on…or maybe it has something to do with the site redesign.

  • yeah

    hahaha i like wave/the idea of wave as much as the next person (fanboy maybe) but i’m glad to know i’m not the only one who believes that comment couldn’t have come from a real person. seriously.

  • yeah

    it’s in three or 4 different sections. atleast when it was to the one side i could ignore it. now i have to scroll through it and it mixes with the content on this page…but it’s in nice formats and it’s relatively small and not a smorgasboard like pervious site layout. anyways i might have to turn on adblock also cause i am kinda tired of seeing ads everywhere i go. fuuuuuuuuuu.

  • yeah

    i think they’ll get to it. well hopefully cause i use multiple accounts and like chatting in all of them…except i got rid of my old ymail account (ha i still have icq. ugh). it took a while for yahoo to integrate with ms messenger and ms messenger vice versa.

  • yeah

    i liked the integration because it’s very useful for lazy people like me who don’t want to use their brain and open up a chat in another tap or window. it also allowes you to pop out and in. thanks goog! i don’t use gtalk as much as before but it’s seemless when i do. it’s simple. i can be in my email inbox while chatting and i can save my convo’s, etc…

  • yeah

    lol. it’s a well placed conspiracy.

  • yeah

    it came up on my google search two days ago and i was like i don’t believe this crap, and then i read the post arrington put up, and now i’m here and i see your post and it’s all starting to make some kind of stupid sense. ugh.

  • yeah

    you know what would be cool/good for google, if their users can send personalized ad’s or rated ad’s to their contacts. so that ad bar that scrolls above the inbox frame, that also contains options for quotes, word definations, joke of the day, word of the day, news from nes sites you use, etc…if there was a way we could star those things and use the arrow button to forward some of these things to friends.

  • http://www.stareclips.com/?orkut StareClips.com

    Maybe the integration IS Orkut?

  • http://www.stareclips.com/?orkut StareClips.com

    Well, Google already has apps like this that can be installed in Gmail. I use Facebook and Twitter from within Gmail already.

    I think the bigger news is that the feature is being directly integrated into the Gmail experience, and isn’t just an add-on app.

  • http://www.saadkamal.com Saad Kamal

    Google has never done well with consumer products..so i don’t know if this so called ‘new feature’ will actually go anywhere…But I’m certainly looking forward to it…

  • SFGary

    Arrghh! we heard you already. Stop it!

  • http://www.stareclips.com/?orkut StareClips.com

    Yeah… that consumer product of “search” just never quite caught on. And Gmail? I think only, like, four people use it. I hear that YouTube is starting to get popular these days, though.

  • http://www.stareclips.com/?orkut StareClips.com

    It will be Gmail Buzz.

  • http://www.stareclips.com/?orkut StareClips.com

    Scratch that. It will be called Google Buzz. It will be integrated with all Google services to make them social, starting with Gmail.

    It will be at buzz.google.com (which redirects to http://www.google.com/buzz)

  • http://www.socialwok.com Ming Yong

    Bill,
    Google Apps is probably the best email & collaboration suite out there; 20mil users & 2 mil small medium businesses using Google Apps. The emergence of social feeds as a way to collaborate is why we did Socialwok – social layer for Google Apps. We will be one of the first developers to do integrate with Google’s feed social layer.

    We have been very impressed with the Google teams working on different aspects of Google’s products like AppEngine (btw is what Socialwok is built using), Google Apps. We believe this is the key platform to play in. Hence, we brought feed social sharing to Google Apps

    Ming
    CEO of Socialwok (http://socialwok.com)

  • Surgo

    My bet is that like raindrop future.
    https://mozillalabs.com/raindrop

  • http://www.socialwok.com Vikram

    Checkout private Facebook like feed / status-updates for collaboration, directly inside Gmail.

    http://www.socialwok.com/tour_gmail

    Socialwok for Google Apps.

  • Hmmm

    I wonder what the googleboys do with their 20% self project time. I mean they are not really coming up with new stuff just addons to the existing stuff.

  • que

    1.5 M. Arringtom has a Tiananmen Square lite moment and blogs about it.

  • magnum

    For sure this will serve as a lithmus paper for their milestone this year. This update for sure will be the one’s we have with google docs and other social product we had, with some sauce from BIG G.

    More details: http://bit.ly/google-docs-competition-details

  • Dirk Dijksma

    Looks like google is coming to combine it’s Google Wave platform with a kind of social network aggregator. Looks different from sites like http://www.plocky.com and http://www.friendsfeed.com.

  • http://armdevices.net Charbax

    We need better algorithms in social.

  • :-O

    Orkut still exists?

  • http://ychittaranjan.wordpress.com/ Chittaranjan

    Maybe something very trivial as allow sharing of Gmail/Gtalk status with others via a tweet or add native support for fb/orkut/twitter.

    Whatever it is, would be done to ensure people spend more and more time within G pages so that they can show us more and more ads!

  • http://ychittaranjan.wordpress.com/ Chittaranjan

    BTW, should the title have read “Brand New” instead of “Broad New”?

  • :-O

    I guess that makes 3 people who like it. Judging by the HitWise stats for it, that’s about it.

    The idea was nice, as a pet project from some engineer there, but in the real world it’s a flop.

  • :-O

    Yay, yet another place they can shove AdSense ads in our faces! W00T!

  • http://www.natfinn.com/ finn

    when the h#ll is the coverage supposed to start?

  • http://www.stareclips.com/?orkut StareClips.com

    That’s by design. A while back, when Google was releasing a new product every 3 seconds, the head honchos at Google decided to scale that back a bit. So, they called for “more features, less products”.

    So, Googlers are expected to roll out with more features, enhancements, and integrations between existing products… rather than creating wholly new products all the time.

    This is why you’re seeing a lot more updates to the existing stuff rather than new products altogether.

  • http://www.stareclips.com/?orkut StareClips.com

    Joking aside, the version of Orkut in Brazil alone gets more reach than sites like photobucket (globally) and ask.com.

    Orkut in the U.S. gets more traffic than CNN and CNet.

    So, really… though people don’t talk about Orkut that much (except to joke about it being less popular than most social sites)… it really gets a lot of traffic in the grand scheme of things.

  • http://bract.us bractus

    I am not so sure this going to be better than facebook. But personally, I like Google’s API (e.g. gdata) for integration purpose.

  • Patrick

    fucking called it?

    =]

  • henry

    Mr Arrignton’s post the day before should have had a disclaimer on it as one reader nicely put it. Mike knew what was about to be announced but chos not to mention it to his readers. Others have added there two cents on this:

    “In hindsight, how about a ’sponsored by Google’ disclosure.”

    “Based on the recent Google announcement you sound like a pawn….. You may have integrity by not taking laptop bribes for stories but you seriously lack integrity.”

    “Arrington, you sell out. You knew Buzz was coming and came up with this “preamble” – very very dishonest. This is nothing more than a Press Release for Buzz without the disclaimers…..proof TC is a total sellout and they hide this fact by high-profile sacking of one journalist to “prove” how “clean” they are…..sad.”

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