by SEO Consultant
R. Falconer
R. Falconer
Google will today announce some big changes to its social media strategy. It is believed these will include changes to Gmail that will allow users to post messages in a similar way to Twitter or Facebook.That social media sites Facebook and Twitter have a huge potential for advertising in the future will not have gone unnoticed at Mountain View, CA.
Google recently announced that its only social success to date; YouTube, has started to make a profit. Google bought the already successful but loss making YouTube in 2006, and has steadily increased the amount of advertising on the site since.
Google has numerous products that have some form of social aspect to them. Reader, Calendar, Bookmarks and others all encourage sharing, there is a full social network site in Orkut, Google Profiles links in well with Wave the much maligned collaboration tool. Then let's not forget SideWiki which allows users to leave messages on any site via a browser add-on.
The problem that Google has had is that these products have been too disparate. There hasn't been a single combining element that has allowed all the best features to appear in one single interface in a way that could compete with Facebook. It sounds like Google is attempting to make up for lost time now.
Before a speculative guess at what Google may be announcing today, it is worth pointing out that both Microsoft and Yahoo! have already attempted to introduce social features to their mail services. Neither attempt has been particularly well thought out or successful.
Google is less likely to go down the same route as the other big payers, or at least if they do go down the same route, they'll go much further.
Linking up Gmail and Profiles is the obvious first step and adding additional social functionality to Profiles would be a simple second but in order to really make things work, it'll have to do something extra that Facebook or Twitter doesn't already do. That's the tricky part and one even Google doesn't always get right. See Google Wave as an example.
Expect something with status updates today, linking up two or three Google properties but don't expect too much functionality straight away. Google's normal modus operandi is to launch, test the water and add more as time goes on.
