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.

Big news this morning — Microsoft is buying my company for $6 billion!

My virtual portfolio just increased by $38,808 after the news was announced. Too bad I haven’t been here long enough to participate in the employee stock purchase plan.