Google: The Biggest Network Of Sites

The chart below, provided to us from comScore, shows the number of unique visitors that went to each company’s network of web sites over the past year:

comScore gets its data from a global panel of roughly two million internet users from which it extrapolates findings to the entire online population. This sampling methodology has been much criticized but remains the standard in the industry.

The visitors that comScore counts aren’t the same as the active visitor numbers that Facebook self-reports (see Has Facebook’s Active User Growth Dropped 25% to 50%? for more on that), but the numbers do seem to be close to Facebook’s own statistics.

Facebook: Likely The Biggest Single Site

Of course, the Facebook “network” is pretty much Facebook itself. “Google Sites” will include everything from Google’s search engine to YouTube to Google Blogger. On a “what’s the most popular site” basis, Facebook is likely ahead of Google.

Indeed, when we dig a bit deeper we can see this isn’t all about Google search, Gmail and Maps. Much of the time spent on Google sites happens on YouTube. Indeed, if you look at it by country, you see what a huge contributor YouTube is and what a strategic purchase the video site turned out to be for Google.

Facebook: Most Minutes Spent

In terms of total minutes spent and share of minutes (engagement) Facebook is the global leader, followed by Microsoft, Google and Yahoo in that order. What’s interesting is that Yahoo has half the monthly minutes of Google, which appears at first blush to contradict the “95% content 5% search” time-spent argument often made for display advertising.

ReadWriteWeb has a lengthy discussion of the reportedly impending product launch. It’s based largely on hearsay but here are the main bullets from that post:

• The service will offer photo, video and status message sharing
• Everything shared on Circles is shared “only with the most appropriate circle of social contacts in their lives, not with all your contacts in bulk”
• Chris Messina and Jonathan Sposato are/were involved
• The core concepts are based on the work of Paul Adams, a former Googler now at Facebook. Adams developed the widely viewed presentation that diagnosed the deficiencies with current social networks (read: Facebook)

Liz Gannes at AllThingsD reports, in response to RWW, that she obtained a statement from a Google representative who said “unequivocally” that no such service is launching at SXSW today.

Despite persistent rumors dating back many months ago, Google has denied that it is creating a stand alone social network. Google has said instead that it’s integrating a “social layer” into its various properties. Indeed the company has been doing that, most notably in search.

There is already a “social circles” offering at Google, though it appears to have been superseded by social search, which is more extensive. Regardless there is a “product” in the works, other than merely a “social layer,” over at Google. The company has reportedly briefed a number of people on it.

Originally rumored to be called “Google Me” there have been rounds and rounds of speculation about what a new Google social network would be and do. Perhaps in anticipation of the new product Google recently revamped its Profiles offering to make it more closely resemble a Facebook page.

Google is undoubtedly being very cautious here given how badly burned it was with the less-than-optimal rollout of Buzz.

Postscript: We received the following statement from Google:

We’re always experimenting with new ways to improve our products. As with all experiments at Google, we don’t have any additional information about if or when products will launch.

Postscript 2: AllThingsD’s Gannes talked to some of the people (e.g., Chris Messina) allegedly involved in “Circles” today in Austin. She says they told her there’s no “product” and there may never be one. This is curious because there is something that was shown to people but perhaps it was simply an early prototype of something that won’t ever appear.

Related Entries:

• Google’s Search Results Get More Social; Twitter As The New Facebook “Like”
• Google’s New Social Project Is … A Toolbar? Yawn
• Google Me: Is It Really Named Emerald Sea Or Google +1?
• Will “Google Me” Be A Worthy Facebook Challenger Or Will It Be DOA?
• Report: Google To Leverage Other Social Networks To Make Itself More Social
• Is Google Buzz Dead Already?
• Google Buzz: Google Takes On Twitter, Facebook & Even Foursquare

A new round of rumor and speculation has emerged from Quora (and TechCrunch). The supposed internal-testing name for Google Me was reported to be “Emerald City” but is now actually, supposedly, “Emerald Sea.” But wait, it could also be called “Google + 1″ and be a toolbar or browser extension that will try and duplicate the function of Facebook’s Like.

It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma — or rather that was Russia.

Here’s the original discussion on Quora that sparked the latest round of speculation:

Emerald City is the project name for what people outside of Google refer to as “Google Me”. Lots of projects like youtube, google docs, search, calendar, groups, picassa, etc have had significant social integrations added to their projects. This will launch as a major initiative across multiple services at once and many of the hooks endusers will see are currently being tested internally. It is by no means done and is quite ambitious in nature.

If you recall, the Google Me discussion began in June with a Kevin Rose tweet that Google Me was a direct Facebook competitor. Later Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Google Me wasn’t a product but a “social layer” across many Google properties and products.

There’s also a parallel discussion that Google is developing a gaming site or destination based on a rumored $100 million investment in Zynga. Regardless, I’m ready for Google to do whatever it’s going to do. And there’s a very real chance that it will all be a big anti-climax.

On a related and somewhat strange note, Google’s social networking site Orkut just this week added badges.

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.

Let’s establish all the usual qualifiers; this is an unconfirmed story and so on. And there are plenty of times when these TechCrunch-surfaced rumors turn out to be wrong. But this one seems to be supported by a job posting (“Product Management Leader, Games – Mountain View“).

Given that, here are the main elements of the TechCrunch story beyond the headline itself:

• The Google investment in Zynga is “between $100 million and $200 million”
• The investment was completed “a month ago or so”
• “Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year”

Then there’s further speculation that gets more interesting:

• “It will also give Google the beginning of a true social graph as users log into Google to play the games”
• PayPal could be replaced with Google Checkout “as the primary payment option”

Zynga recently announced a partnership with Yahoo that could serve as a kind of template for the Google relationship. Zynga also launched FarmVille, one of its most popular games, on the iPhone. These efforts are a part of a broader move for the company to “diversify” and become less dependent on Facebook — to which it owes its initial success.

Given that there’s not exactly a “search angle” here, I’ll be concise about what I find fascinating about this story.

During the heyday of Second Life, Google started and later shuttered its own “virtual world” — a kind of open-ended social game — called Lively. While it would be difficult for Google to build a credible gaming site from scratch, Zynga potentially jump-starts a Google Games quite effectively. Beyond that consider “Google Games” played on “Google TV.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The idea that social gaming becomes a backdoor into the “social graph” for Google is fascinating. When considering the anticipated rebirth of social networking at Google (“Google Me”) I opined that Google needs to either put together a great product, more elegant or functional than Facebook, or come at social networking from a different angle:

[W]hat capabilities or services or tasks does it offer or enable that Facebook doesn’t or can’t? Because if Google Me can’t answer the “why question” it’s DOA.

Clearly Facebook offers social games. But gaming might be part of that different approach for Google. I’m sure that gaming isn’t the alpha and omega of Google Me (groups also appears to be part of the strategy). However it could be a useful “contributor” to a social network.

Then there’s the Google Checkout angle.

Google’s payments platform remains a missed opportunity for the company, and for Android to some degree. Google failed to market the service to consumers when it launched and it has made limited inroads vs. PayPal. However it’s a service that still has enormous potential for Google if it can gain consumer adoption. Tying it to a popular gaming site, which is speculation built upon speculation, could give Checkout a meaningful and perhaps even material boost.

In summary, the hypothetical “Google Games” offers a range of potential benefits for both Google and Zynga. These include additional independence for the latter from Facebook and several opportunities for Google around payments and the social graph. We’ll see if any of it happens.

Yesterday I asked Google for a comment and received a friendly but anonymous response: “We do not comment on rumor or speculation.” Of course not. That almost certainly means that something is coming.

I told several people yesterday that it was probably a beefed up version of Google Profiles. And that’s almost certainly part of whatever will show up.

Google was held to have defamed a priest by allowing an anonymous Internet user’s post on Orkut, which called the priest a “pedophile.” The judgment upheld an earlier, lower court ruling from 2008. Google owns social-networking site Orkut, which has a significant following in Brazil.

Suits like this would not, generally speaking, succeed in the US.

There’s a great deal at stake here for Google, especially with the more sensational and higher-profile Italian case. Google advocates a “notice and takedown” regime vs. what appears to be a kind of strict liability standard implicit in these cases: the offending content appeared and the law was held to have been violated.

As a practical matter there’s almost no way to operate these massive sites, populated largely with user-generated content, and police that content for offensive or illegal speech or other violations (e.g., copyright, privacy) as it appears. While you could scan or monitor for the appearance of selected words and phrases and hold those posts or uploads for review and approval that practice would operate as a kind of quasi-”prior restraint” against speech. But that kind of approach might be what certain governments or legal systems would advocate.

The emerging question is: what sort of burden is going to be placed on Google and other online publishers outside the US to police content in quasi real time vs. responding when someone identifies a violation and requests content removal?

Libel laws in the US are very well established for traditional media; however there’s a “double standard” of sorts that allows online publishers to avoid liability for user-generated content that would not be similarly permitted offline. Yelp can’t be sued for a defamatory review (though the individual can) while the NY Times couldn’t print or publish a libelous review. To some degree that freedom and flexibility was granted to “new media” to allow it to develop — as much as it is a recognition of the practical enforcement challenges already discussed.

As online becomes the center of publishing “going forward,” how will the law evolve? Will we see more burdens and controls imposed on online publishers?

The Italian and Brazilian courts are effectively not allowing or recognizing any distinctions between traditional media and online or the challenges of managing content posted or uploaded by millions of users daily. They’re also trying to assert domestic laws against a global corporation that seeks to have a standard policy across markets internationally.

Similar issues originally were raised, as long as a decade ago, with the sale of Nazi literature and memorabilia on eBay and Amazon, which is legal in the US but illegal in Germany. In those cases, the companies had to modify their rules and offerings to accommodate German law.

But that was largely prior to the current era of user-generated content.

Consider India and Brazil, two growing Internet markets. ComScore released some stunning numbers about what’s happening in those two countries and how Google owns a lot of the online experience there.

In Brazil, for example, about 30% of a person’s online time is spent on a Google property. In India, it’s about 29% of online time. For perspective, comScore says that the worldwide average amount of time spent on Google properties is 9.4%.

Google accounts for almost 90% of searches conducted in Brazil, and 88% in India, comScore says. But it’s not just Google’s search engine powering this dominance. Consider these numbers:

India

• Social networking: Google’s Orkut gets 68% of time spent in this category
• Multimedia: YouTube gets 83% of time spent
• Maps: Google Maps has 64% of time spent

Brazil

• Social networking: Orkut gets 96% of time spent
• Multimedia: YouTube gets 92% of time spent
• Maps: Google Maps gets 71% of time spent

ComScore suggests that Google’s dominance in these two countries is because their emergence on the world scene coincided with Google’s rise online. Perhaps. But one thing’s for sure: It’s Google’s world, and we’re all just living in it.

At the outset there are apparently 12 social gadgets, eight of which were created by third party developers. For example, there’s a chess gadget and other casual game gadgets — casual games have become huge on Facebook — that allow iGoogle users to play with one another. There’s photo sharing, featuring Picasa and Flickr, and a to-dos gadget, which allows you to share your list or created a combined list with others. In some cases, there will be Twitter-like activity streams (see “Timeline” below) that display updates to all participating users in real-time.

Here are some screenshots provided by Google:

These social gadgets would seem to owe something to both Facebook and Twitter but they also represent a logical evolution of the iGoogle product and gadgets platform more broadly. The personalized homepage has “tens of millions of users,” according to Mayer. It was until recently also the fastest growing product at Google. Making it “social” will likely generate further growth.

I asked whether social gadgets would make an appearance on Google Maps. I was told no but the Maps API permits developers to build social gadgets for iGoogle using Maps. Google is also thinking about extending this into mobile but that will take longer because of technical challenges and constraints in the mobile browser.

I also asked about Google Wave and whether there would be any crossover. Mayer said that she thought there would be some collaboration between the teams.

What’s fascinating to me is that Google has gone from a company that a few of years ago failed to fully appreciate how big social networking would become to one that done “a 180″ and fully embraced community. Google offers a social layer — as with the introduction of social gadgets — across many of its services. Latitude in Google Maps in another obvious example, but there are numerous others.

We don’t yet know how successful social gadgets will be. However, in a best-case scenario, it could potentially become the missing “social center” that has not taken root through other Google services including Orkut, Google’s actual social network.

In addition, if one steps back and imagines a rich ecosystem of gadget developers and engaged users, down the line, one can see iGoogle evolving into a Facebook-like experience featuring community, apps, status updates and so on.

I don’t mean to suggest that iGoogle will challenge Facebook (it won’t) or that anyone else is thinking along these lines exactly. But there’s an interesting, potential parallel if social gadgets really take off and iGoogle evolves into a new social media platform.

Danny live blogged the keynote earlier this morning. He jokingly compared Wave to Lotus Notes. In some respects that’s not an entirely inappropriate comparison, given the scope of the product and the emphasis on collaboration — though the Google folks would probably disagree.

Wave seems to be conceived as a total communication and collaboration tool and therefore a successor and replacement for IM and email. In some respects then this is as ambitious as Android, perhaps even more so. It also encompasses mobile communication between users and mobile to PC communications in theory. The keynote presenters demo’d Wave on the iPhone and Android running in the browser.

One of the reporters in the in the room asked the panel about how they thought they were going to get people to change their behavior and abandon email for this new tool. Google responded that what they showed was an early “developer preview” and that there was still lots of work to do and a longish time horizon for the product. What wasn’t discussed was the way that social networks (and Twitter to a lesser degree) are taking the place of email in many instances. So it may not be such a huge problem to shift behavior in the end, provided the user experience is compelling to people.

Wave does seem to me to be a bit bulky and complex, from the blur of screens and demos I saw this morning sitting on the floor in a hall with more than 1,000 people. But the real-time aspect of it — the fact that you can actually see the other person typing — is pretty compelling.

This is a project that unfolded in Australia with 100 Google engineers and began in 2007. It was based on a general concept pitch to Brin by the developers, Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who had previously built Google Maps. Based on that track record Brin said he approved the project and associated resources (not unlike a movie studio approves a pitch by a trusted director or producer). It sounds like Google has spent a bunch of money on this (no figures were discussed) and is pretty invested in its success.

There is no apparent business model (though one could imagine enterprise licensing) and Google intends to open-source it, which is probably smart from an adoption standpoint. Yet stepping back Wave is consistent with Google’s larger effort to move software and applications development into the browser and the cloud.