Facebook said this about Google, in its statement from my original article:

We wanted third parties to verify that people did not approve of the collection and use of information from their accounts on Facebook and other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles—just as Facebook did not approve of use or collection for this purpose.

Facebook has since said it should have handled the issue in a more “transparent” manner, and is no longer working with the firm of Burson-Marsteller, but Facebook hasn’t refuted the allegations that the firm was trying to get out.

This is where an email that Burson-Marsteller sent to privacy and security researcher Christopher Soghoian is instructive. Soghoian was so put off by the pitch that he posted it online, sparking today’s headlines. In part, the email explained:

Google Social Circles does not ask “permission” from individuals who will have their profiles, connections and other personal data shared in the new network. Google will simply “scrape” their information from dozens of sources and compile the data into one massive dossier aligned directly with user’s personally identifiable information.

Got it? Google is “scraping” up this information from Facebook. Not said is how Facebook itself is encouraging people to put the information out for such scraping, through recommendations it makes in its own Facebook privacy settings.

No Choice: Facebook Shares Your Name & Sex

By default, your name, your profile picture, your gender and any Facebook “networks” you belong to are shared with the world. Facebook gives you no choice with this. If you want to be on Facebook, that’s all information you have to give up to the entire world.

Facebook Recommend Making Family Public & More

After that, you can make some decisions on what to share, but Facebook pushes you toward certain public choices. Here are the recommended settings for how information posted to Facebook should be shared with others:

Facebook is recommending that its users make their status information, photos, posts, bios, favorite quotations, family and relationships public to the world. That includes, as I’ll explain more below, getting gobbled up by Google.

Facebook Recommends Making Friends Public

Elsewhere, Facebook has yet more privacy settings you can control. In the “Connecting On Facebook” area, everything is recommended to be open to “Everyone,” as you can see:

Included on the list of connections that Facebook encouraging users to share with the world are what they like through the service, their hometown, where they worked and everyone they’ve declared to be a friend on Facebook.

But surely, you might think, “everyone” means “everyone on Facebook” and not “everyone in the world.” You’d be mistaken, if you believed that. Some of this information may indeed show up on your public web page that is explicitly shared by Facebook with Google and other search engines.

Facebook Recommends Putting Your Public Information In Google

A third area of Facebook’s privacy settings deal with search engines. By default, Facebook recommends that you put a page out about yourself to Google and other search engines:

That page will be populated with some of the information that Facebook earlier encouraged you to share with the world. This could include a number of your friends and other information, as happens with my news editor here at Search Engine Land, Barry Schwartz:

That page then ends up in Google (along with other search engines like Bing):

If Facebook were really concerned about Google “scraping” personal data off these pages, it would have never created them back in 2007, in order to chase Google traffic. It certainly wouldn’t be creating them by default for every new user on Facebook.

How About That Facebook Open Graph?

Now, these personal pages don’t contain all the “everyone” information that Facebook has encouraged people to share. For example, I’ve never seen hometowns being listed on these pages. You only see that if you’ve logged into Facebook.

Similarly, while some friends are shown, these pages don’t show them all. So how else is Google doing all these things that Facebook’s PR firm was trying to educate people about, which includes:

Google is taking different parts of people’s lives—parts they deliberately separated onto different sites—and presenting the collage Google created to other people. Reminiscent of Google Buzz, Google’s latest plan totally disregards the intimate and potentially damaging details that could be revealed, including sexual orientation, political affiliation, personal connections, etc…

I suppose that Google might tap into the Facebook Open Graph. That graph, to my knowledge, has all the information that Facebook had handily encouraged people to collect in one place, details like their sexual orientation, political affiliation, personal connections, etc.

If Google did this, presumably it would be with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s blessing, since when he announced the Facebook Open Graph, he was all for the idea that everything should be connected socially:

Today at our third f8, we are making it so all websites can work together to build a more comprehensive map of connections and create better, more social experiences for everyone. We have redesigned Facebook Platform to offer a simple set of tools that sites around the web can use to personalize experiences and build out the graph of connections people are making.

Of course, Google can only do this officially if it has Facebook’s blessing to access the Open Graph. That means agreeing to Facebook’s terms. Google, for reasons it continues to not make clear, doesn’t like those terms. It prefers to build these connections using what’s out on the public web.

It’s Facebook’s Way Or The “You Violate Privacy” Highway?

That, of course, seems to have caused Facebook to become paranoid to the degree that it authorized a PR firm to stir up concerns that Google was somehow doing something dubious. Elsewhere from the company’s pitch:

On all of the sites Google scrapes, you can change your mind. You can delete your account. You can make or break connections to other people. How do you remove this information from the database that Google is sharing with hundreds of millions of people? You can’t.

Actually, you can. If you delete a friend on Facebook, that’s going to break the connection that Facebook exposes to the web and thus further break the connection that Google may have formed by reading web content.

In the end, it’s really kind of a stunning counterplay by Facebook. Facebook has encouraged its users to share information with “everyone” and actively published that information out onto the open internet. But because Google doesn’t want to play by Facebook’s rules to harvest this publicly published information, Facebook seems to want to cry foul.

If Facebook were really concerned about this, at the very least, it would close down all the public search pages that it published into Google. But that’s not going to happen, because that’s too much in Facebook’s interest.

Related Stories

• Drill (Down), Baby, Drill: Facebook’s New “Simple” Privacy Settings Still Pretty Complex
• Google Settles FTC Charges Over Buzz, Agrees To 20 Years Of Privacy Audits
• Mine The Web’s Socially-Tagged Links: Google Social Graph API Launched
• Facebook: You’ve No Right To Export Email Addresses (Unless It’s To Yahoo & Microsoft
• Facebook On Social Search: ‘We Want To Work With Everybody’
• Google & Facebook: If You’re So Smart, Work It Out!
• Has Facebook Become The Master Key To Unlocking The Web?
• Examining Facebook’s “Smear Campaign” Concerns About Google Social Circle

The required prerequisite reading is the Daily Beast article talking about the PR campaign that Facebook attempted. Also see reactions to the news in this Techmeme roundup.

Let’s start with the allegations. I emailed over to Facebook:

So I read the Daily Beast article. Does anyone want to talk in more detail about what exactly it is that Google’s doing with your data that you feel is improper?

I’ve actually asked Google several times about why they aren’t doing more with Facebook data, because as best I can tell, they pretty much haven’t been using it at all. So I’d like to understand more.

Facebook replied:

No ‘smear’ campaign was authorized or intended. Instead, we wanted third parties to verify that people did not approve of the collection and use of information from their accounts on Facebook and other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles—just as Facebook did not approve of use or collection for this purpose. We engaged Burson-Marsteller to focus attention on this issue, using publicly available information that could be independently verified by any media organization or analyst. The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way.

You and your readers can look at the feature and decide if they have approved of this collection and use of information by clicking here when their Google account is open: http://www.google.com/s2/search/social. Of course, people who do not have Gmail accounts are still included in this collection but they have no way to view or control it.

OK, as it happens, I know a few things or two about the Google Social Circles product. Like, I saw it before it ever when public and wrote about it when it did. Like, it’s actually called Google Social Search, for another. I’ve also tracked the Google-Facebook squabble over Facebook’s data as it has heated up. Let’s dive in.

Google Social Circles Launches

Google Social Search — which used the Social Circle feature — launched in October 2009 as an experimental feature. Google Social Search Launches, Gives Results From Your Trusted “Social Circle” is my detailed article about it, from the time.

When Google Social Search launched, it allowed you to see things that people you know had created and posted on the public web. It would highlight content from your friends.

Nothing that Google Social Search presented was “private” content that was somehow magically pulled out of Facebook or other social networking services. All the content was on the public web, being found by Google already, unless publishers deliberately had blocked it from being in Google and other search engines.

But did Google use “private” information from other services to figure out who your friends were? No. Google had three methods of creating your “Social Circle,” as it was dubbed in the product. Two involved data from Google itself, and one depended on people adding links to their Google Profiles.

In the first Google method, if you had a Google Reader account, that was used to understand what sites you subscribed to, as a way of making those sites themselves part of your trusted social circle.

In the second Google method, if you had Gmail chat or Gmail contacts, they’d be part of your social network. This didn’t happen unless you deliberately chose to enable the Google Social Search service. Your friends also weren’t listed publicly. In fact, you couldn’t even see your own social circle.

In the third method, using information outside of Google, people could add links to their Google Profile page that lead to other social sites. Here’s how the Google Profiles “Links” option it looked back then:

Once you linked up a social site, Google could look at pages on those sites — public pages that anyone could see — to understand who you might be connected to. As I explained back then:

1. Google sees I have a friend on Twitter
2. That friend links to their blog from their Twitter profile
3. Google understands that they are connected to that blog
4. The friend’s blog has a link to their Flickr account
5. Google may understand, then, that the person I know on Twitter is also related to their Flickr account, even if that account wasn’t listed on their Twitter profile

Google Social Search Gains “Social Circle” Feature

In January 2010, Google Social Search went live for everyone who wanted it. Google Social Search Goes Live, Adds New Features is our story from the time that covers it.

As a new feature, you could actually see the people in your “social circle” for the first time. Here’s an example of how that looked:

Down at the bottom, individuals in your circle were shown. You could also use the “show paths” feature to better see how you were connected to them to see content that was shared.

Later in 2010, Google made Google Buzz another option that helped feed into Google Social Search. Sites that you connected to your Google Buzz account could be used to power the sites considered to be part of your “Social Circle.” If the moon was full, and the tides were right, that is. It didn’t always work, I found.

Google Social Search Gets Integrated, Includes Shared Content

In February 2011, Google Social Search was no longer restricted to showing up at the bottom of Google’s search results. Instead, the service integrated social content anywhere within the regular search results.

In addition, rather than just showing social content that was created by your friends, it now began to show content that your friends may have shared through services like Twitter.

Our story from earlier this year — Google’s Search Results Get More Social; Twitter As The New Facebook “Like” — goes into much more depth about the change. Here’s an example of how the sharing looked then:

No Facebook Info Used, Officially

In that example above, you can see how something that someone shared on Twitter was being flagged that way through a social search annotation. But what wasn’t being highlighted, as our article detailed, was anything being shared on Facebook. From the story:

Despite Google’s wide expansion of Social Search, the changes don’t include any Facebook “Like” activity, even if you’ve added your Facebook page to your social profile.

Why not? [Google's] Cassidy said generally: “This is just the beginning, and we’re going to be doing much more to improve the comprehensiveness of Google Social Search.”

Facebook and Google do have a deal that allows Google to use Facebook fan page information in the completely separate Google Realtime Search service. I’ll come back to that in a moment. But Google Social Search doesn’t have Facebook data at all, not at the time we last wrote about it in February.

I’m reconfirming the situation. Perhaps Google Social Search quietly gained Facebook content since February. Certainly the “Social Connections” tab within Google Social Search suggests this.

Google Social Circle Vs. Google Social Circles

I’ve been talking all about Google Social Search, not Google Social Circles, the thing that Facebook is all upset about. But that’s been necessary, because there is no “Google Social Circles” product that’s live and on the web.

There was a Google Social Circle (singular) feature that was part of Google Social Search, when it launched. But that was quietly renamed at some point over the past year. Meanwhile, a new Google Social Circles product is rumored to be coming.

When Google +1 launched in March, it created an entirely independent network of people that you could see +1 data from, based on:

• People in your Gmail & Google Talk chat list
• People in your “My Contacts” group in Google Contacts
• People you follow in Google Reader or Google Buzz

There was no option for adding connections to non-Google services like Twitter or Flickr or Facebook. Only Google services were involved.

In writing about that, I also went back to Google Social Search and noticed that the “social circle” name that had been used for connections there had been changed. As I wrote (and I’ll bold the key parts).

What’s confusing, perplexing or otherwise odd is that Google already allows you to create a social network that combines contacts from Google-based services (such as Google Buzz) with your networks from third-party sites like Twitter.

Google does this as part of its Google Social Search service. This combined network used to be called your “Social Circle” on Google, back when Google Social Search launched formally in January 2010 (it was an experiment before that). That launch also provided a way to view your social circle.

You can still view your social circle here on Google, but now these are called your “social connections.” I’m not sure when the name was changed, but I suspect it was dropped fairly recently, in the wake of a rumor earlier this month that Google was about to launch a “Google Circles” social network. Google’s help page still talks about your “social circle.”

All your social connections are used to help power Google Social Search results. But only your Google-based connections, right now, will power +1 matches within Social Search. Officially, Google says this is because it wants to start conservatively with +1, ramp up slowly and make sure everything works.

So Google “Social Circles” remains a forthcoming rumored product. Google “Social Circle” is the former name of “Social Connections” now shown to those who use Google Social Search. Facebook, I think, is concerned about the former while pointing at the latter.

Facebook & Google Social Circles

While Google Social Circles remains a rumored product, if it’s real, there should be plenty of Google refugees who now work at Facebook who know about it. They’d be understandably concerned that some new Google product might hope to suck up social connections that people have formed on Facebook.

Add to this is that the new Google +1 service is actually live. While officially, Google says it’s not a social network but rather an extension of search, +1 buttons are about to spring up across the web in a matter of weeks as a rival to Facebook Like buttons.

For those buttons to really fly, the need to be hooked up to a way for people to easily share what they +1 with others. Google has nothing like that now. But perhaps in conjunction with the buttons going live, we’ll see a Google Social Circles product launch. And potentially, Google might try to pull Facebook data into that. As I wrote from the Google +1 launch:

Beyond web page ranking, the new +1 button potentially allows Google to leverage search to build its own robust “social graph” or “view” of how people are connected to each other. Right now, Google can see some connections, such as people who tweet to each other. But +1 may allow Google to see more direct connections.

Google has been especially hobbled in that Facebook is unwilling to let people export their contacts directly to Google. Meanwhile, Google keeps saying that there’s something in Facebook’s terms and conditions that prevent it from using Facebook Connect to link to Facebook’s social data in the way that even tiny Blekko does.

That something, as best I can tell, is that Google doesn’t want Facebook to see inside its network, in the way that Facebook would like. But getting a straight answer from either company just doesn’t work. They remain at a standoff.

Facebook & Google Social Circle / Social Connections

While the above is speculation, we do know that Facebook right now is specifically pointing to the “Social Connections” part of Google Social Search and, from the email I was sent, raising concerns. Again, from that email, and I’ll bold the key parts.

Instead, we wanted third parties to verify that people did not approve of the collection and use of information from their accounts on Facebook and other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles—just as Facebook did not approve of use or collection for this purpose. We engaged Burson-Marsteller to focus attention on this issue, using publicly available information that could be independently verified by any media organization or analyst. The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way.

You and your readers can look at the feature and decide if they have approved of this collection and use of information by clicking here when their Google account is open: http://www.google.com/s2/search/social. Of course, people who do not have Gmail accounts are still included in this collection but they have no way to view or control it.

I’m a third party, so let me do some verification.

Weak: Collection Of Information From Others Without Approval

Is Google collecting information into Google Social Search from other sites without permission? It depends on whose information and permission that we’re talking about.

Google collects content from all over the web without explicitly asking permission of publishers, a system that aside from some very tiny bumps has worked well, since publishers can easily block Google.

In collecting this information, Google (like Bing and other search engines) is going to collect things that the authors of material might not have given explicit permission to collect.

For example, if you tweet something, you authored that tweet. Twitter published it. Google collected it, and made it visible in web search. Google didn’t ask the author for permission to list it in web search, but neither was it blocked by the publisher from doing so.

So yes, Google collects information from others, including Facebook, which over the years has deliberately caused more of the information it publishes from authors (its users) to be made public in order to gain traffic from Google and other places.

I will say that one concern is that I have is that at some point, Social Search became a product that you couldn’t opt out of. I’m not sure exactly when this happened. But in our last story from February, we wrote:

If you’ve never linked your Google Profile to any of your social networks — and you don’t make use of any of Google’s own social features, such as Google Reader, then you shouldn’t see social results appearing in your listings.

If you have linked your social accounts, you might wish to see “regular” results that haven’t been “socialized,” so to speak. You can only do this by logging out of Google. Otherwise, there’s no option to disable them from being blended.

Google needs to provide an “off” button, for those who want it. But still, even with the default “on,” data from services outside of Google isn’t being pulled in unless someone deliberately chooses to create a Google Profile with links to their social accounts.

Unclear: Collection Of Facebook Information Without Approval

Is Google collecting information into Google Social Search from Facebook without permission? No, not that I can see, fro my own testing. Google Social Search, as I’ve explained, also says it doesn’t list any Facebook data at all. This is despite the fact that Google has an agreement that allows some of this same data to be shown in Google Realtime Search.

If Facebook’s own content isn’t being used, how about Facebook information, in a way that Facebook doesn’t permit? For example, is Google somehow mining Facebook’s connections to build social search connections? Maybe. And maybe that’s fine.

Remember that link that Facebook said to check out? Here’s an examples of what I see from my connections on it:

That’s for my connection with Barry Schwartz, my news editor here on Search Engine Land. I’m told in the “Content via” line that I’ll get content related to him from Facebook in two different ways (thus the two arrows).

Below that, I’ve given the exact details. One method might be that I’ll get content from him via his Facebook page. The second is that he’s connected to our Search Engine Land page at Facebook, so I might get content from him that way.

Barry’s Facebook page is listed in Google, so Facebook itself is publishing it to Google. It seems odd to then object that Google is using material that might be on it, especially when Facebook has an explicit option that allows people to block search engines from reading their pages, if the user wants.

Google — or any logged out user — only sees a limited amount of information on that page, anyway. A few friends will be listed, along with some key details about Barry. But that’s it.

Potentially, Google is mining the Facebook Open Graph or linking ordinary links that it finds back to the graph, in ways that Facebook doesn’t like. But this is unclear.

Certainly, it’s odd that Google is saying that Facebook content is being used on the Social Connections page when it has said that it’s not being used in Google Social Search, in the past. I’m checking on this.

But having said that, there’s nothing that should be showing up on the web at all from Facebook that’s not already public. Indeed, our fan page that Barry’s connected to? Any action that Facebook users take on a fan page is public to the world, because that’s how Facebook has made it.

Wrapping Up

Really, you made it this far? Bottom line time. I can’t see that Google is using any information in Google Social Search from Facebook.

I can see that Facebook profiles do get listed in the Social Connections area. This might really be a harbinger of things to come, rather than something that’s happening now. But that might be a harbinger that Facebook’s worried about.

If Google does have content in Google Social Search from Facebook, then as best I can tell, any of that is already public, published by Facebook itself.

If Facebook really wants to present things in a transparent way, in the way it says it does, then I’d like to see a blog post explaining in detail the concerns it has with Google.

I’m waiting to see if I can get someone on the phone from Facebook to talk through these issues more. It’s been over two hours now. If I do, I’ll have more. At least Facebook got back with me with an emailed statement within minutes after my request. As for Google, I’m still waiting for anything at all.

Related Stories

• Google Settles FTC Charges Over Buzz, Agrees To 20 Years Of Privacy Audits
• Mine The Web’s Socially-Tagged Links: Google Social Graph API Launched
• Google Social Search Launches, Gives Results From Your Trusted “Social Circle”
• Google’s Search Results Get More Social; Twitter As The New Facebook “Like”
• Meet +1: Google’s Answer To The Facebook Like Button
• Just Weeks Away, A Preview Of The Google +1 Button For Websites
• Blekko, Bing & How Facebook Likes Are Changing Search
• Bing Integrates Facebook Likes Further Into Its Search Results
• Facebook: You’ve No Right To Export Email Addresses (Unless It’s To Yahoo & Microsoft
• Facebook On Social Search: ‘We Want To Work With Everybody’
• Google & Facebook: If You’re So Smart, Work It Out!
• Has Facebook Become The Master Key To Unlocking The Web?

Postscript: Also see How Facebook Enables The Google Social “Scraping” It’s Upset About

Ångströ represents the ability to hone in on highly focused, relevant news across professional networks. Where search engines such as Google and other news aggregator services have immense infrastructures that return a huge array of random results, Ångströ analyses a wide breadth of information from multiple data sources to deliver very few, yet very intelligent results.

The pundit consensus is that this is about Google’s yet-to-emerge new social networking effort — and I’m sure it is — but there are probably some search-specific applications of this technology that we’ll see in the future.

Mainly the Angstro buy made me wonder what the supposed “Google Me” (as a metaphor for Google’s broader social strategy) will turn out to be. Google now has numerous properties that have explicit or implicit social dimensions: Orkut, Buzz, Latitude, GMail, Maps, Contacts, Calendar, iGoogle, YouTube, Vevo, Google Talk, Google Reader, Picasa, Profile, Docs, (the now abandoned Wave) and more. There’s also a coming Google Music service and, reportedly, a Zynga investment and a gaming site to arrive later.

Google has also reportedly put former mobile chief Vic Gundotra in charge of social. Gundotra is highly capable but it will take intense work, creative inspiration and even luck to figure out how to bring all these disparate pieces together into a coherent and compelling whole.

Yet maybe there isn’t a single “social network” or product per se (Orkut 2.0) that Google has in mind. Perhaps the company is going to embed a social layer into each of its properties, more deliberately and explicitly than it has done to date. However that probably wouldn’t be enough by itself to capture the public’s imagination.

An earlier and very thoughtful presentation by Google Senior User Experience Researcher Paul Adams criticizes Facebook privacy and hints that groups might be the center of a new Google network. Though provocative, groups doesn’t seem splashy enough by itself either.  However Google “Social Circles” (contacts + social media content), which is not quite a product but is the basis of social search, does seem to be ripe for further development. The term “circles” even suggests a product name focused on groups.

Gaming and mobile are additional, fruitful areas for Google to attack from a social standpoint, so might shopping be as well. But other than building a kind of “me too” offering, there’s no obvious social media strategy for Google. Orkut, Wave, Buzz and several other weak or shuttered products (e.g., Lively) argue that Google can miscalculate, in some cases badly, when it comes to social and product development.

However with the recent spending and acquisitions Google has signaled that it’s very serious about building a product — or products plural — that will help it compete with Facebook and/or provide a kind of social infrastructure to keep it relevant as the Internet continues to evolve. This is a very public and high stakes effort for the company.

I’m eager to see what it produces.

Postscript: Google just bought social-mobile game development company SocialDeck. So add that into the mix. Gaming definitely is emerging as a primary entry point for Google in its effort to build a social network or more social experience.

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. 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.