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Sep. 24, 2007

It is reported that a Google meeting yesterday was so secret that all attendees had to sign confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements that forbid them from discussing what was shown to them at the meeting.

On September 23, a group of about 15 industry luminaries attended a highly confidential meeting at the company's headquarters to discuss Google’s upcoming plans to address what is now dubbed “The Facebook Issue.”

Notwithstanding the non-disclosure agreement, three of the attendees went "off the record" in trying to explain a bit of what Google is planning to do with all of this. According to one of these attendees, the company’s goal is to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform itself.

The bottom line: if Facebook is 98 percent open, Google wants to be 100 percent open-source.

All in all, on November 5 Google is planning to announce a new set of APIs that will enable developers to better leverage Google’s social graph database. Developers will start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google Web services over time.

We will likely see 3rd party iGoogle gadgets that will make use of Orkut’s social graph information, Google's basic implementation of what it is planning.

From that point on, we might see a bit more such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs.

Additionally, Google is considering allowing third parties to join the group at the other end of the platform, meaning other social networks such as Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and about a thousand others to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs.

In the end, Google seems to be planning to add a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services, with Orkut as their initial main source of social graph information and possibly adding third party networks to the back end as well.

On average, social networks would have little choice but to participate to get additional distribution and attention.

Amar Gandhi, who apparently wasn’t at the meeting and whose title is the rather unassuming “Product Manager, Orkut,” was previously at Microsoft where he unsuccessfully tried to integrate social networking features into Vista.

Brad Fitzpatrick, the chief architect of Six Apart until he joined Google in August, is leading the charge to make the Google project as open as possible. Patrick Chanezon, Google Evangelist, will have an active part in overseeing the project.

Potentially, this could be called a killer strategy according to some observers.

Facebook has a platform to allow third parties to build applications on Facebook itself. However, what Google may be planning is significantly more open, allowing third parties to both push and pull data, into and out of Google and non-Google applications.

It will be interesting to see how all of this pans out, realizing the importance transitive advertising can have on social networking sites. There's no question anymore that Google is fully realizing the enormous potential all of this can have on its bottom line and yesterday's meeting is the best proof of that.

As for some of the team players, some people have noticed Fitzpatrick’s social graph post connected the dots to his new job at Google, and speculated that Google’s has been working on something really big in this area.

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Source: Tech Crunch