Since the end of 2007, Google has allowed people to create Google Profile pages for use with certain Google services. For example, if you created content in Google Maps, your Google Profile let you share who you were with others using that service. The same profile also served to identify you when using the completely different Google Reader service.

Now Google Profiles are going beyond Google’s own services. They’re being promoted as a way for people to tell the world who they are and, to some degree, being offered as a way for people to claim their identity in Google’s main search results.

“People have no control over how they appear when other people search for them on Google. That’s a big issue we’ve heard,” said Joe Kraus, a director of product management at Google. “The new results are to better control what people see and improve the ability for people to fine what they’re looking for.”

In the new system, a new “Profile results” section will appear at the bottom of a Google search page, when it finds a strong match in response to a name-based search. Up to four profiles will be shown:

You can also search directly for profiles here.

Building Your Profile Page

The profiles all come from Google Profile pages, which means in order for a chance to appear, you’ve got to have a page. That’s fairly easy. There’s no charge to have a page, and you needn’t use any particular Google services, either. Just sign-up here. You can also search for “me” on Google, and if you’re signed-in, you’ll see an option promoting how to make your own profile.

After signing-up, you can provide a variety of information about yourself, including:

• Your picture
• Your first and/or last name
• Nickname
• Where you grew up
• Where you live
• Where you work
• Schools you’ve attended
• A biography
• Links to web sites you wish to list
• Pictures from your Picasa, Flickr or other online photo albums
• Contact information, which can be shared selectively with people

Not all of these options were offered when Profile pages were first launched. The pages have gained more features over time, and the new additions have been pretty poorly communicated, I’d say. If you’re like me, you’ve probably had a fairly bare display.

The new system will cause many people to reexamine their profiles, as they hope to appear in Google’s main results. But with only four spaces, some names will be competitive. Which ones will show? Those that Google feels are “comprehensive enough,” Kraus said.

Does that mean you need to fill out all the fields, including what your “superpower” is? No. Kraus said there are no hard-and-fast rules, especially since the system’s ranking criteria are likely to change over time. But for now, those who at least fill out the form with their first and last name (this is the basic requirement), along with a few links to content, will probably increase the odds of appearing.

Profile Page Options: From Job Title To Links

As an example of what you can do, here’s my profile, which until yesterday had only consisted of my photo, my name and a few links. I’ve pimped it up since then:

Below, you can see how information in my profile’s “What I do” box gets combined with the “Current Company” box to form a job title below my name. Under that, the “Where I live now” box is used to show my location. All this is done using the Edit Profile option:

Whatever you put in these boxes will appear. There’s no attempt to verify that you really do have a job title that you claim to hold or that you work for a particular company. However, there is an option for others to report profiles that they feel are inappropriate.

As for my biography, I used the “Short bio” box to enter what I wanted to appear. This box even allows you to add links to your bio:

For those wondering, so far, these appear to be straight links that do pass PageRank. The nofollow attribute is not used, nor do I see other blocking, so potentially anyone can use their Google profile for link building efforts. I suspect that nofollow will come down the line.

Speaking of links, you’ll notice that in the upper right-hand corner of my profile are several links I’ve listed. These are added using the Links area of your edit profile page:

You can add any links you like. However, Google will also suggest some for you. Sometimes it can tell from information you’ve entered what links might be related to you, using the Google Social Graph. Or enter your FriendFeed link, and it will suggest other services you’ve told FriendFeed about.

As mentioned, you can also add a photo strip to your profile, pulling in pictures from public albums on Google’s Picasa, Yahoo’s Flickr or any URL that provides a photo feed. Just use the Photos tab to do this.

Verified Names & Emails

Now let’s look at two special things showing on my profile, that I have a “Verified name” and a “Verified email,” as shown below:

Don’t go looking on your profile page for the option on how to verify your name. It’s not there. Instead, to have a verified name, you need to enroll in the Google Knol service and verify your name there (see Google Knol – Google’s Play To Aggregate Knowledge Pages). If you’ve done that, you get a verified name. If not, you don’t.

It’s crazy, but it’s also a symptom of how piecemeal Google’s entire profile system feels to have developed over the past year. It’s as if Google drove its social networking car out onto the racetrack back in 2007 to chase after Facebook but kept adding parts to it during the race, without stopping.

Should you get a verified name? Right now, it doesn’t influence whether your profile will rank better in profile results. But if you’re trying to convince people to trust that the page is really controlled by you, it probably makes sense.

Then there’s the verified email. The idea here is that you’ve shown Google that you can send email from a given domain. For example, if you claimed to work for Microsoft, the system allows you to prove that you’ve received email from an address at microsoft.com. Or as the help page says:

When people who know you visit your profile and see, for example, your school’s domain name, they’ll be able to know that it’s the real you on your profile.

As for those who only have email from a free service, such as Yahoo, Hotmail or even Google’s own Gmail, they’re out of luck. These services aren’t seen as trustworthy enough to allow for verification.

While I understand that concern, I also find it odd. If many people start having verified email addresses, then it suggests those who don’t have profiles with verified emails are somehow less trustworthy. And since the entire Profile results system is designed in part to help those with less “net presence,” as Kraus called it, to have a shot of appearing in Google’s results, it’s unfortunate they get discriminated in this way.

Of course, as with verified names, verified email addresses don’t mean you’ll rank better. Those unverified folks have just as good of chance of coming up as the verified people. It just from a perception standpoint, they might have profiles that seem less trustworthy.

Vanity URLs For Profiles

Your profile is a web page, and that means it has its own URL. By default, your URL will be a long string of numbers. For example, my profile is here:

http://www.google.com/profiles/113217924531763968801

Of course, last week there was a great flurry when it was noted that Google started allowing profiles to have “vanity URLs.” Want a URL that uses your own name? You can have it.

Sort of.

It turns out that vanity URL must be the same as your Gmail address. In other words, whatever your address is on Gmail, that’s going to be your address in your vanity URL. If my Gmail address began emperorzorg, then I’d have a vanity URL that looked like this:

google.com/profiles/emperorzorg

Oh joy. If you have a Gmail account, and you claim your vanity URL, then you expose you email address to the world. Google explicitly warns you that this can happen, but it’s still pretty sucky. Why not operate the way that Google’s YouTube does or Yahoo’s Flickr, where you can have a username that is different than your email address?

Kraus said that Google is trying to have a unified namespace, where everyone has one name with Google and things are kept as simple as possible. That means using your Gmail name as your profile’s URL.

But wait! Life certainly isn’t so simple at Google. I actually have at least two active Google accounts, one of which isn’t linked to Gmail at all. I think I got that one by signing up for AdWords or some other service before Gmail existed. I’m also far from the only person in this situation, given I’ve seen ample Google help pages over time on how to transfer a particular service between different Google accounts.

And that non-Gmail account? The good news is that I can use that to get a vanity URL of my choosing. That’s right. Any Google Account not linked with Gmail can set the URL to whatever name they want, assuming that name is free.

Of course, this means that if you have an existing account, you’d have to find a way to move some of your services over to the new one (not always easy or even possible). You might also find the name you want isn’t free. And behind the scenes, if you ever do get a Gmail account? Whatever name you picked will be your Gmail address, Kraus said.

Clearly I’m grumpy over all this. I wish Google had let people pick whatever names they wanted for their URLs and kept it separate from Gmail addresses. But that’s how things are.

Choosing What To Reveal

Unlike with Facebook, there’s no granular control over what you share with the world on your profile. If you list where you grew up, everyone will see that rather than you selectively deciding to share it with just friends or family. It’s all or nothing. So don’t put anything on your page that you’re not comfortable sharing — which is easy, since nothing other than your first and last name is required to show up in search results.

An exception to sharing relates to Contact Info. This is an area where you can list your email addresses, street addresses, phone numbers, IM addresses and your birthday. You can selectively decide which of your friends to share this information with, and you can create groups of friends.

How’s all this play out in the Google-Facebook saga? With most of Facebook’s searches being people-oriented, is this Google trying to take on Facebook in the people search space?

“We already are a people search engine, in that people search for people all the time on Google, so we’re trying to improve it,” Kraus said.

True enough. And the change should be welcomed by many. I’ve regularly gotten email from people wondering how they could show up better for their names, especially in cases where there’s unflattering information about them. Yahoo was recently sued in one case. Personal reputation management is an entirely different issue — but even in those cases, there’s a core of the person wanting to be able to speak for themselves in the search results. The Google Profile results offer a new opportunity for this to happen.

For more, see related discussion on Techmeme.

Right now Friend Connect is in a very limited beta with a few “white listed” sites. However, eventually, site owners will be able go to a wizard (available here later today), select “social gadgets” or modules, and get code that will quickly allow them to add those features to their sites. Those include “registration, invitations, member galleries, message posting, reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.” Google said that they’re starting with a core group of social gadgets but developers are expected to build out a wide array of gadgets over time. And with a few tweaks, any application currently built on or compatible with the OpenSocial platform can be modified to work with Friend Connect.

While OpenSocial works with a range of high-traffic sites and networks, Friend Connect will help push related applications out to smaller publishers and the so-called “long tail.” There’s no hidden monetization scheme or even options available to publishers using Friend Connect. It’s possible that Google Gadget Ads could be made available to publishers in a parallel gallery over time. (But I actually suggested this during the call with Google, not the other way around.)

Now back to data portability: Friend Connect will allow me to sign in using OpenID, and I can invite contacts from my various networks to join me on Friend Connect-adopting sites. In addition, users’ activities on Friend Connect sites can also be shown in news feeds on their other networks.

Site owners using Friend Connect get to see some but not all user data. And unless users affirmatively allow it, owners won’t necessarily be able to communicate directly with Friend Connect gadget users on their sites. Larger publishers may be less likely to go for Friend Connect for these reasons. They will likely want to “own” users and their data more directly. However, using Friend Connect doesn’t preclude site owners from having direct relationships with Friend Connect gadget users on their sites.

Google says it developed Friend Connect “to lower two barriers to the spread of social features across the web. First, many website owners want to add features that enable their visitors to do things with their friends, but the technology and resource hurdles have been too high. Second, people are tiring of needing to create new logins and profiles and recreate their friends lists wherever they go on the web. Google Friend Connect offers a solution to both of these issues.”

Since the site/wizard isn’t live yet (neither are example sites), here are a couple of screenshots provided by Google. The second one illustrates how FriendConnect social gadgets may look on sites:

Collectively, the various data portability initiatives, as well as efforts like Friend Connect, which make it easier to integrate social features into sites, are helping transform the broader Internet from a publishers’-centric model (i.e., “walled garden”) into something more fluid and permeable.

Postscript: Some sites using FriendConnect are now live.

Did you know there’s a way to tag links on pages to indicate social connections? I’d heard about this vaguely, but you can bet there’s going to be much more public awareness and potential use, thanks to Google launching its new Google Social Graph API. Now available, the API allows developers to discover socially-labeled links on pages and generate connections between them.

"We want to make the connections searchable. We think there are a few things people will do with that. We think they’ll build some [social linking] exploration tools," said David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google who oversees the company’s OpenSocial effort.

The API lets developers locate links that make use of the XFN and FOAF labeling systems. XFN is pretty easy to understand. If I wanted to link to my personal blog and indicate it was mine, I could do it this way:

Daggle

<a href="http://daggle.com" rel="me">

See the code underneath the link? That’s the code used to make the link. The rel="me" part says that I’m pointing at something that is me, i.e., that the author of this page says belongs to me. There is a list of 15 types of relationships that can be defined, such as someone who is a co-worker or someone you have a crush on.

Very few people use these labeling mechanisms, Glazer said. However, they exist out there in a variety of tools that add them without you knowing.

For example, here’s my Twitter profile:

dannysullivan

On it, you’ll see that my profile box lists this for my web address:

Look at the code in that link, and you’ll see Twitter automatically labeled the link as "me" without me even realizing that. Other tools like LiveJournal, WordPress, and Vox do similar labeling.

Developers can harvest this data and play it. Glazer stressed that Google has no idea what will be done with it. The company is just putting the ability to mine its index out there and seeing what comes of it.

Even if you’re not a developer, you can have some fun playing with the API. There some forms you can use to explore page connectivity here. Note that they aren’t working properly for me right now, but that will likely be corrected soon.

In the example below, I entered the home page URLs for my work site (searchengineland.com), my personal blog (daggle.com), and my Twitter profile:

It came back to tell me based on link data that Twitter was explicitly saying it was connected to Daggle (so 2 out of my 3 sites were connected there). But it couldn’t find a connection between my sites and Twitter (which is the case). I could easily correct that and build up my linkage if I wanted to. I haven’t because, at the moment, there’s been no compelling reason to do so.

Note that it also found other sites claiming a connection to me, such as my FriendFeed, LinkedIn, My Blog Log, and Technorati profiles. These are all again places (I assume) where because I’ve listed URLs, the "me" attribute has been added. Another tool can show those who link to me as a contact.

My chief concern was what happens if someone wants to "fake" being me. Glazer said this is difficult because of the number of links I can control will tend to outweigh anyone else. Being dubious of meta data in general, I still want to go hmm, we’ll see. But since we don’t even know what apps will make use of this data, it’s a bit early to worry.

One chief advantage that Glazer said that may emerge is that if people do more tagging, it may be easier for them to go to any social platform and have their profiles be autofilled. Indeed, even if they don’t tag, this could happen. For example, you might sign up for a Twitter account, enter your blog URL, and Twitter could use the API to scan for anything connected to your blog (such as LinkedIn, etc.) and prepopulate fields. It’s something that Vanessa Fox wrote a long post about wishing could happen, and perhaps it really will happen.

For more, see discussion on Techmeme here.

• Social search is hard, in that many searches are sensitive, so letting people in your network know what you are looking for raises serious privacy issues.
   

• Google might try doing more with labeling or tagging results as a way to implement social search. Marissa talked about the existing Google Co-Op service being a success this way in terms of health searches. Personally, Co-Op seems to have largely failed to catch on, from what I’ve seen. We also know that Yahoo’s experiment with tagging search results didn’t go very far (see The Promise & Reality Of Mixing The Social Graph With Search Engines for more on that).
   

• Marissa raised the idea of Amazon-like recommendations. To some degree, Google already does this through its personalized search feature. However, the suggestion is that Google could allow you to have a network of friends and contacts, and that their searching activity could be used to influence what you see. Again, Yahoo (among others) had thoughts of doing exactly the same thing years ago but never moved forward with it.
   

• Gmail comes up often. It’s clear Google continues to see Gmail contacts as a starting point for implementing any type of social influenced product. Google The Stealth Social Network? has more background on some existing moves the company has already done in this space.
   

• Would Google let others bring their social data to the table to re-rank Google’s results? That doesn’t seem likely based on the interview, with Marissa in particular talking about how other sites using Google’s core data aren’t allowed to re-rank it.

Be sure to also check out Eric Enge’s interview from earlier this month with Grant Ryan on social search. Grant’s from Eurekster, the real pioneer in social search. How the company thought social search might go changed when it collided with reality (a lesson many fail to remember when they get excited about social search). A key part:

As far as social networking and integration of search, as you are probably aware, we (Eurekster) had a deal with Friendster around social networking search. That was one of our first deals. The first crack at the idea of social search was that a lot of people find information through people they know. We actually did an implementation with Friendster, where everyone had different search results based on their friends and friends of friends, and that was quite a sophisticated application.

But, people have got so many friends that look for different things that it’s kind of all over the place. What happens within groups of users? This gave us the idea and impetus for the Swicki product, which is now the core focus of Eurekster, where if you have got a topic and a group of people that are interested in that topic, that’s where the group of the people watch for what they could be learning from them. That’s where it really adds a lot of value – at the social level.

I’m still working on my promised "Search 4.0: Social Search" piece to recap some of the latest moves and where things may be going. I’d better get it done! But my aforementioned article, The Promise & Reality Of Mixing The Social Graph With Search Engines, has lots of background here, especially from the middle part down.

Back in September, Google launched a friends update feature on Orkut. Activity Streams & Other Social Nuggets From Leaked Google Video covers this plus how Google is working to create "activity streams" for all of its products as a way to make them more social and akin to Facebook.

In October, Google got behind OpenSocial, a way for various social platforms to share social data and let developers produce applications for that data. However, so far OpenSocial doesn’t seem to have done much to socialize Google products. Instead, Google seems to be continuing along the lines of making (often mistaken) assumptions that people in your Gmail contacts are also those you’d want to share stuff with.

A nice article in November from the New York Times looked more at the role that Gmail might play as an "Inbox 2.0" to socialize Google. But in December, we saw the first serious application of this.

Google Reader Gets Social With Friends Shared Items covers how in December Gmail contacts were assumed to be "friends" that you’d want to share feed items with. Keeping It Private On Google Reader covers how many disagreed with that. To date, it still remains the case that people that Google considers your "friends" (even if they aren’t) in Gmail will automatically get notified if you share an item.

In today’s Google Operating System post, Ionut lists a few other places where things are shared, ranging from Picasa activity to items saved via Google Shared Stuff. However, I don’t see that my Gmail contacts somehow automatically notify me if they save to shared stuff. Yes, you can share — but it’s one way, as far as I can tell, and also only broadcast to people who you choose to invite. In contrast, the Google Reader change was more proactively going out and telling people about what you’re doing. As for Picasa, you see activity of things you’ve subscribed to — similar to how YouTube subscriptions work. That’s different then automatically getting told about things that your contacts are doing.

Still, it seems likely more proactive activity stream-style socialization is coming. If Google’s smart, they’ll put a hold on this stuff until they come up with a clear and unified way for it to be rolled out and controlled by users. Instead, so far, we’ve gotten this piecemeal rollout of Orkut feeds, Google Reader sharing, and new profile pages.

I used to call Google the stealth portal because of how it rolled out portal features without being obvious about it. It would be a mistake if it becomes the stealth Facebook or stealth social network. The last thing you want in the social space, where privacy is such a big concern, is a feeling that you’re sneaking up on people.

By the way, don’t forget that Google Maps continues to be a major area where Google is playing in the social space. Some recent posts about that:

• Google Turning My Maps Into Social Mapping Platform With Collaboration, Ratings, And Comments
• Google Allows Group Collaboration On My Maps
• Google Maps Goes Wikimapia, Lets The People Move The Map Points

Also see discussion about today’s news on Techmeme.

When I logged in today, I got this message popping-up within Google Reader:

I was a bit taken aback. Let’s look again at what it tells me:

Your Reader shared items are being made available to your friends from Google Talk. You can see what these friends are sharing; they can see what you are sharing, and that you use Reader.

Really? Without asking me, items are being shared? And my friends are now flowing stuff my way?

Thinking about it more, I shouldn’t be concerned. After all, I have a public feed of shared items here that anyone can access, if they know where to look. Why should these exact same items, being shared with a tiny subset of the entire world that they are already accessible to, freak me out?

I guess it’s because Google Reader never asked if I wanted to be connected with my friends, i.e., whether I wanted to have Google itself start behind-the-scenes making relationships in Google Reader for me with people that previously were restricted to chat. It’s disconcerting.

Don’t get me wrong — it IS kind of cool. For example, here’s an example of how by clicking on the new Friends Shared Items link, I can see a list of items that have been shared only by my Google Talk contacts.

I’ve also got the ability using the new Friends tab in the Google Reader settings area to add or remove people:

Well, sort of. If you check the associated help page, it turns out that to remove someone, you have to remove them as a Gmail/Google Talk contact. Wow. How about some selective control? I might want to have "Reader friends" that are different than my Google Talk friends.

Part of the new change was also encouragement for me to create one of the new Google Profile pages. I did that, but in terms of Google Reader, it doesn’t provide any benefit to my external public feed. It doesn’t show out there.

Internally, I assume my friends see something similar to what I see for Greg Sterling:

Notice that if for some reason I decide I’ve had enough of Greg — say perhaps he begins dominating my Friends Shared Items feed in some Scobleesque way — I have the option to hide him and his items.

Overall, I do like the feature. I just think that if Google is going to start socializing its various applications, I need more granular control over who sees what, in the way that Facebook offers.

Meanwhile, add Google Reader, like Orkut, to the list of Google products that now have a social aspect. Google To Pressure Facebook To "Free" Social Data & Planning Google Earth World? from me back in September looked at how Google was said to be considering ways to socialize its products. At that time, Google Reader had no social feature. Now it does.

Inbox 2.0: Vision And Perhaps Confusion At Google And Yahoo covers more about how the email addresses that Google has — all Google Talk accounts are based on an email address — may be a key way the company might go forward to building out a stronger social network than its existing Orkut.

Many things are interesting about this. First, it makes good sense for users and for Google to offer a unified, single profile system. People already have what might be called “profile fatigue;” why fill out unique profiles for each product on Google? Second, and more provocatively, it potentially turns Google itself into something of a social network, assuming widespread adoption.

Privacy advocates will be concerned about how Google might use the information across its network and whether there will be appropriate privacy safeguards. (Think Facebook data mining, only potentially more pervasive and effective.) Google will assert that it won’t improperly use personal information.

Profiles could play into personalized search as well as ad targeting (local, demographic) in the same way that Web history is starting to play into personalized search. For example, for local search and AdWords, the existence of user location on a profile could help with disambiguation and more accurate geotargeting in many cases. (In mobile, “My Location” will offer much more precise targeting next year.)

The existence of uniform profiles also could serve to reinforce Google usage in many ways by helping provide broader and deeper integration of its products. It could also boost Checkout and will likely be integrated with Google Accounts eventually (with shipping and credit card information). Required Google registration for products like GMail and for My Maps represents a foot in the door for enhanced profiles. Of course, it remains to be seen how many people fill out Profiles — and how extensively.

There’s more discussion at Techmeme.

Bebo is part of OpenSocial, the competing Google initiative that also features MySpace, among others. However, Bebo’s embrace of the Facebook platform may signal that that the latter’s platform (and not OpenSocial) is the one that will become the standard. There are already hundreds of applications for Facebook platform that give it a considerable head start.

Here’s a Facebook blog post from today about the move to allow others to access and adopt its platform architecture:

In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms. Of course, Facebook Platform will continue to evolve, but by enabling other social sites to use what we’ve learned, everyone wins — users get a better experience around the web, developers get access to new audiences, and social sites get more applications.

Here’s more discussion of the Bebo platform launch from Techmeme.

In a related bit of news, Yahoo announced that it had introduced several applications for Bebo, including Answers:

With the addition of Yahoo! Answers to Bebo’s new application platform, Bebo users are now able to tap into each other’s knowledge and expertise, benefiting themselves, their friends and the wider Yahoo! Answers community of millions of users. Bebo users can publish and share their Q&As with their friends and promote their reputation and participation in the Yahoo! Answers community via a module displayed on their user profile. They can also ask and answer questions directly within Bebo, and view Q&As from their Bebo friends.

It strikes me that this version of Answers on Bebo could actually be better than Answers itself on Yahoo because of the filtering provided by the community (your network).

Here’s what Hansell says about Google’s plans:

When I talked recently with Joe Kraus, who runs Google’s OpenSocial project, he said: “We believe there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it more social.” And when I pressed him about the relationship between the social aspects of iGoogle and Gmail versus Orkut or some other social network, he said, “It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand.”

We’re left to “read the tea leaves” a bit there and figure out how some of these properties might be tied in together. iGoogle has been gradually becoming more “social,” as has Google as a whole, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see profiles tied into iGoogle and iGoogle tied to mail and so on. Orkut, which has been growing, suffers from what might be called “the Froogle problem.”

Despite its clever name, many people never fully recognized that Froogle was Google Shopping. So Google eventually changed the name of Froogle to Google Product Search. Such a functional name change might be in order for Orkut too, especially as part of the larger effort that Hansell’s post suggests.

Here’s what Hansell says about Yahoo’s plans:

Yahoo is testing a method that can automatically determine the strength of your relationship to someone by how often you exchange e-mail and instant messages with him or her….

Yahoo Mail will also be extended to display other information about your friends as well. This can be a link to a profile page, and also what Yahoo calls “vitality” –- updated information much like the news feed on Facebook. There could also be simple features that are common on social networks, like displaying a list of friends whose birthdays are coming up….

There will be some sort of profile system attached to Inbox 2.0, [Garlinghouse] said. For people who use a lot of Yahoo services, this profile could be quite rich even at the beginning, as it can draw on activity on Yahoo Music, Yahoo Shopping and so on….

It seems like there is too much complexity here, leading to potential confusion. Yahoo Mail is a huge asset for the company (and so is/was MyYahoo), but there may be too much of a good thing in this vision. Of course, it’s mostly informed speculation in Hansell’s post.

There is probably a growing need for a kind of “dashboard” or “control center” where people get feeds and content, organize favorites, present their resume or profile, and communicate with each other. There’s no single entity or site that does all these things.

Personal startpages/newsreaders/widget containers include Netvibes, Pageflakes, iGoogle, and MyYahoo. Yahoo’s Delicious and MyWeb, among others, are good social bookmarking sites that help organize content for future consumption (and sharing). And sites like LinkedIn or Facebook offer profiles and personal pages.

There may well be a way for Google or Yahoo to bring these elements together in an elegant way — a kind of personal portal or uber-startpage — but if not done correctly or well, it could wreck a relatively good thing, at least in the case of Yahoo Mail.

It’s like that old joke: What’s a camel? A horse designed by committee. There’s more discussion at Techmeme.

Web Search

Everyone’s all excited about the "social graph" these days, that terrible term that simply means social network data or social linkage. If you know how people are connected, there are all types of interesting things you can do, from applications that let people compare movie tastes to targeting ads.

Facebook is seen as having the best social data, which is why Google wants to tap into it through OpenSocial (see here and here for background). But what about the "web graph," that similarly terrible term that simply means how pages are linked together? Years ago, Google tapped into the web graph to improve its relevancy and now remains the top search engine in the world.

While the major search engines thankfully no longer play the page count game, I’ve got no doubts about Google’s claim to be much larger than its rivals in general. It has been scaling up its index — the collection of documents it gathers from the web — consistently since the company started.

That large index gives Google a huge advantage over rivals. It knows more about what’s on the web than anyone else. So why not share? Why not start an Open Index Alliance where there’s a coordinated effort to crawl and index all the documents in the world, allowing anyone to tap into the raw data?

An absurd idea? Why? Just having the same collection of documents doesn’t mean a competitor would be as good as Google. It will still come down to the search algorithm, that system that sifts through all the data and decides which documents are best. Google’s index isn’t the secret sauce — it’s the Google algorithm that’s important.

Still, the index is important competitively. Deny that to competitors and they have to go through the significant time and expense of building their own. That takes away from time that can go into improving the more important search algorithms. In addition, if competitors can’t build as large an index, they’ve got less data to work with and potentially are further behind Google.

Still, why should Google be open to helping others by opening up web search? Two reasons. First, it’s consistent. If Google’s going to push for those with existing advantages to open up through efforts like OpenSocial and the Open Handset Alliance, an Open Index Alliance just seems like fair play.

Second, it’s not just competitors. There are researchers who would like to tap into a huge collection of web documents. To my knowledge, this isn’t something that currently happens. Some researchers might be able to tap into a small portion, but certainly not everything Google has on tap.

I was able to attend Foo Camp this year, and a session of creating an open index was one of the highlights for me. Doug Cutting talked about his work on things like Nutch and Lucene. At the table listening with great interest were both Jason Calacanis of Mahalo and Jimmy Wales of Search Wikia. Both want a massive index they can tap into. Wales, in particular, gets much press pushing on Google for not being open with its index. Others at the session raised the issue of researchers wanting to use the data. And midway through, Google’s Larry Page arrived and joined in.

Maybe some of that conversation will flow back to Google and an open index might happen. Personally, I’m not counting on it. I still feel Google sees its web index as a crown jewel to be hoarded and protected, not fully shared — and if I’m correct, that’s deeply ironic given the "open" push in other areas.

Book Search

There’s probably no deeper example of Google being closed than when it comes to book search. Google’s efforts to scan books are well known at this point. But Google keeps coming under fire for agreements said to restrict those scans for being used by its competitors. For background, see:

• Battle For Books: Evil Google Versus The Altruistic Open Content Alliance
• The Politics of Book Search: Some Research Libraries Decline to Offer Books to Microsoft, Google

To be fair, Microsoft has also added similar restrictions. But if Google’s on an "open" kick, why not join the Open Content Alliance?

The OCA was started in 2005 as a rival to Google’s book scanning efforts, with Yahoo and Microsoft as major backers but the Internet Archive also participating and leading as a neutral party. Of course, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle has had plenty of non-neutral things to say about Google’s book scanning efforts, concerned that Google is gobbling too much up for its own.

Well, what better way to counter the "closed" PR than to join the OCA? And more importantly, it would be better for everyone if scanning the world’s books were done in a coordinated manner, rather than the probable duplication of efforts that is going on right now.

Firefox Default Search

I was bemused to see Jeremy Shoemaker come under fire for questioning why Google is the default in many versions of Firefox, since he was right in his assessment. A Firefox developer responded that Google’s the default because users want it and that Yahoo couldn’t buy the default slot. As a Firefox user, I must have missed the vote that was held. But sarcasm aside, Google DID buy the spot — except for some Asian versions of Firefox (Yahoo bought those).

Firefox is important because when Internet Explorer 7 came out, Google was very much of the opinion that users need to get more "choice" about the search provider selected — i.e., the search defaults should be more open.

Google & Dell’s Revenue-Generating URL Error Pages Drawing Fire gives more background on this, plus it highlights that the idea of open choice is fine when Google’s at a disadvantage (in IE7) but restricting choice is fine when Google benefits (with Firefox or Dell’s branded search).

Perhaps it’s time for an Open Search Default Alliance, where the OSDA can figure out how users can best control their search settings rather than this being left to business interests. That might prevent people like Verizon from deciding recently that they’d like to monetize error traffic by seizing control of searches. Since Verizon partners with Yahoo, the OSDA could actually help Google. Of course, it might hurt it in other cases. But it’s all about being open, right?

AdWords & AdSense

Talking about openness when it comes to AdWords and AdSense in the context of cooperative activities is a stretch, I admit. But if you’re going to talk about Google being open in general, you have to address the inherent closed nature of these programs.

How much will an ad cost you through AdWords? Depends on the mysteries of quality score, which was recently declared to us at Search Engine Land that buying an ad for our own name would cost at minimum $5 per click, presumably because we aren’t relevant enough. Right. Because as you know, most people on Google searching for us by name probably don’t want to reach our site. Heh. But competitors buying our name, they are apparently more relevant (or pay more), since they outrank us.

Hey, I understand the concept of an account history, and how over time, things should get better for us. But it can be maddening to people, and the closed nature of how AdWords operates — that black box that just got poked at again, this time by Robert X. Cringely, doesn’t fit the "open" trend some think Google is following.

As for AdSense, how much does Google keep back from publishers? If you’re big, like Ask.com, you’ll know the slice you’re getting. But most people are going to get whatever Google decides to give. AdSense isn’t an "open" marketplace where publishers set prices and see how much advertisers are willing to pay, with Google taking a known and set percentage. Google will take whatever it wants, and publishers are left guessing. So much for open.

In Conclusion

If I come off as harsh, well, I also do a lot of defending of Google as well, as I just did yesterday about Cringley’s post. My goal in this, as with many posts, is to provide some balance. And those thinking Google has swallowed the open Kool-Aid need to think again.

Google does do plenty of things I find encouraging on the open front. They hooked up with the Open Invention Network a few months back. Google was the driving force to get search engines united around the Sitemaps standard. There are no doubt many other examples of where Google is involved with collective, open-source style projects.

But these things are far from an institutional mandate, from what I’ve seen so far — and the latest, most prominent efforts come because being open makes good business sense for Google, not because it makes good sense in general.