Facebook is great, if that's how you happen to communicate with your friends. I don't. I suppose it's due to my age, but I tend to connect with my friends and acquaintances mostly in email and on the phone. Interestingly, Google seems to be building social networking infrastructure not only for the web (with OpenSocial) but also for these more traditional communications channels—with Gmail and Grand Central Google Voice.
From the Grand Central Address Book page:
Use the "Recent" link to see contacts that you have talked with lately
So Google knows whom you've talked to recently. Interesting.
Gmail doesn't currently expose a list of recently-emailed contacts, but it goes provide a "most contacted" list. It's not clear what information is being stored beyond the number of emails sent to each contact, but the "updated" field of the contact record itself—accessable via the Google Contacts Data API—is touched, and it's entirely reasonable to assume that a complete history of emails sent and received is being maintained.
Google's phone-and-email approach is slower and more difficult than Facebook's (Gmail has somewhere north of 51 million users compared to Facebook's 175 million, and Google Voice is just getting off the ground) but it's potentially much farther-reaching. There are roughly 1 billion email users in businesses alone, and over 4 billion mobile and fixed-line phone subscribers.
In the long run, graphing real social networks by watching traditional communications channels—and integrating that data with online networks outlined by OpenSocial—could allow Google to assemble much more useful information than Facebook's walled-garden approach.
It will be interesting to watch this over the next few years.
Comments