Google Intends to Integrate Its Social Applications

Apparently Google learned something from Facebook's success and intends to connect all of its social applications. The new central place for social activities will create feeds for all or your events ("activity streams") and share them with your contacts, if you choose to do so. I called this Social Gmail, but the name of the project seems to be Makamaka. All of these feeds will be managed using Google Reader's infrastructure, so the project will not be launched until Google Reader manages to handle a lot of new users. Here's an example of Facebook feed that served as an inspiration for this project:


Google's social applications that will be included should be: Gmail, Calendar, Docs, orkut and probably others. orkut has recently launched a feature that aggregates and displays all the updates from your friends, so the new feature will be similar.

The updates from your friends section on your homepage shows updates when your friends perform the following actions on orkut:

* make changes to their profile
* make changes to their photo album
* make changes to their video favorites
* accept new testimonials

When you make these changes to your own profile, your friends will see your updates on their homepages.

The new project could also mean a radically improved contact manager that shows a lot of live data from your contacts. Hopefully, the data will be searchable and only available to the persons you trust.

Note: Most of the information from this post comes from a confidential tech talk in which Google's Ben Darnell explained to some Nooglers (new Google employees) how Google Reader works. This tech talk is part of the "Nooglers and the PDB" series of weekly talks, which is open to all Googlers, but it was accidentally posted on Google Video.

{ via Blogoscoped. Screenshot licensed as Creative Commons by Danny Sullivan. }