Tattertech Blog

While it’s quite possible I missed some bit of information somewhere along the line (of what little information is publicly available so far), I’m pretty sure Google has yet again announced an interesting “feature” (they don’t have products after all) that has no clear monetization.

Google does really well in Search. Google dominates Search. There’s no question there at least for the moment (one can remember a time there was no question for Yahoo). Problem is no one can list anything else they do really well in.

I use GMail every day. In fact, despite being on AIM, I keep GMail open just to talk to people on that. I love iGoogle, it’s my homepage for a reason. And yet, how much money do they make off of those? Sure, GMail contextualizes my e-mails (a little creepy), but if I have it open, I’m rarely paying attention to what’s in that little bar. I only look at the window when a new e-mail comes or someone messages me.

And this is what Google does. They have great ideas, but they lack people that have vision to monetize them. Google Docs is great, but there’s no money from that. Other than random speculation about things, what’s different about OpenSocial so far? Is Google going to capture data going through OpenSocial and use it to boost CTRs and CVRs for their ad offerings? Are they going to tag in Ads along with OpenSocial ads and expect developers to not care? As much as I love the concept (especially as I’m working on starting up some social based ventures), I’m missing what Google is getting out of it.

I can only wonder how long before investors and others start wondering about the same thing. They have one product that does fantastic now, but is starting to get a lot of flak. They seem to have no other significant “outs” at the moment (poker term there). As cool as this is, I’m missing Google’s real play here - as I am every other “feature” they come up with.

Nothing particularly amazing here, but it is more validation to my thoughts that you’ll see social networks appearing related to particular interests. Finding networks with niches you’re interested in is simply a means to filter out the noise. We’ve seen the trend with major portals, and it’s no surprise that the trend would occur to some extent with Social Networks.

Now a network that can properly guide people along the “long tail” (or for that matter, a major portal) may be able to fight off some of the fracturing pull. As they are, I don’t know that any of the major social networks are in set up to truly guide their users into their niches. The next big move will be who can make it easy to flow between niche network to niche network (OpenID perhaps?) - and how they manage to monetize against it. It will also be interesting to see just how much room there are for different smaller networks (and how much money each can earn).