socialmedian: We Are Just Google’s Social Test Subjects

User-submitted headlines for this story

Clips

We Are Just Google’s Social Test Subjects

Source: Steve's shared items in Google Reader

Aug 14, 2009

Summary

In the past week we have seen some interesting developments from Google. Inquisitr calls the social gadgets on iGoogle a “stealth attack against Facebook”:

You see, very quietly Google has been working in the background on their social initiative and now as they start to roll out more and more of the smaller parts that will make up its larger social media initiative Facebook would be wise to sit up and pay attention. By themselves Google’s little Social Gadgets may not seem to be threatening but as people add more of them as they become available to their iGoogle pages the potential to make a severe impact on Facebook will become more apparent.

I am not sure how much of a threat iGoogle really is, as it would need significant traffic to really impact Facebook. However, there is no denying the point of the quote that social gadgets on your iGoogle page could easily increase the viral nature of content.

Obviously, the timing of the Social Gadgets release was coincidental to the Facebook purchase of FriendFeed, but it did cause multiple interesting blog posts. I wa

...Read the full article

Comments (2)

Hanna Wiszniewska,

Aug 14, 2009

"Twitter and Facebook need to be looking over their shoulder to ensure they stay ahead of Google. They need to keep focusing on becoming better services, and not on competing with each other. Otherwise, Google will become the dominant social service and Twitter and Facebook will be left wondering what they did wrong." - interesting analysis found via Louis Gray. I for one hope that the three mentioned in the article giants will keep on competing to the advantage of us - ordinary users (but perhaps I'm naive...).

Bernardo K,

Aug 15, 2009

According to the company, Twitter’s downtime was due to an attack. The nature of the attack is not yet known. On the other hand, Twitter down causes people of stunted intelligence and teenagers (of stunted intelligence) everywhere to cry and shake uncontrollably, and Facebook slow…panic and chaos will set in. If you are the sort of person that feels the need to inform everyone about every little inane thing you're doing that nobody in their right mind cares about in the slightest, then this is not your day, as a state of existence of Twitter down has come to pass. Dogs and cats will live together, and there will be mass hysteria – among people of stunted intelligence! Many will throw cash advances ( http://personalmoneystore.com/Cash-Advance/ ) and massive efforts to prevent Twitter down being a condition they have to face again.