Mary S. Butler

Michael Arrington reports on TechCrunch that “Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data.” I’ll let Wikipedia explain the social graph geek concept. I am more worried about another daily timesuck.

Only a few months after creating my profile on Facebook, it is already fifth on the list of sites I visit daily, after my client’s site, Gmail, my Flickr and my company’s wiki. OK, maybe it edges out my company’s wiki.

If Google succeeds at adding “a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services,” creating an engaging environment and, as one TechCrunch commenter suggests, using judicious data mining to measure the depth and exclusivity of your connections, they could contribute additional texture and shading to the friend construct. It may be possible to have these connections be more implicit than explicit. Of course, there are a number of privacy concerns that come to mind, but I suspect the Google team will address these as part of their November 5 announcement.

09/28/07 update: How did Microsoft respond to this news? Yesterday Fortune reported that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was spotted Tuesday in Seattle, headed for meetings with executives at Microsoft. Unfortunately, I have no insider insight to add to that. Kevin Johnson, president of the Platforms & Services Division of Microsoft, was in AA|RF’s New York offices this week and during Q&A with the staff was asked about published rumors that Microsoft was considering buying a stake in Facebook. Johnson said he doesn’t comment on those types of speculations in the press.

In a previous post I mentioned that I did not have a Facebook profile. That is no longer true. I am now a member of the Avenue A | Razorfish network and have reconnected with former colleagues from Forbes.com and cars.com as well. (For any of my friends reading this who are not in my network, I would love to connect with you on Facebook as well!)

In a matter of minutes I had created my profile and added the Flickr thumbnail and Forbes.com stock tracker applications to my page. These applications are a result of Facebook’s decision in late May to offer any company, such as a publisher or software maker, to build services for its members. Although questions have been raised about Facebook’s Terms of Service for the developers of these applications, as a user I found the experience to be a seamless one and the applications encouraged me to spend much more time on the site than I had planned. And, as other commentators have noted, your Facebook page goes beyond social networking and is becoming more like your personalized Google homepage. Although you can’t personalize your Facebook page with a beach theme, you can see which applications your friends have selected for their profile pages, which can be more revealing than their lists of iLikes. Drinks application, anyone?