Internet Marketing Help

With all the rumours flying about Google’s imminent launch of a social network, that will rival Facebook; it might be time to examine what we can expect.

Facebook’s privacy issues over recent months have opened user’s eyes to a grim reality: There is no real alternative. Consumers are realizing that Facebook needs a true competitor, and that the lack of one; is a threat to consumer choice. Why? It provides no escape route for users, when things turn badly.

Google is reported to have been conducting focus group research into social networks, looking particularly at usability. In a fascinating presentation on The Real Life of Social Networking, produced by Paul Adams (from the user experience team at Google), the report examines how social networks (primarily Facebook) operate online; and ways in which they fail to mirror real-world social interactions.

“The problem is that social networks we’re creating online do not match the social networks we already have offline. This creates many problems and a few opportunities.”

The presentation highlights the fact, that we don’t have just one group of friends. We have many. We have work friends, neighbors, family members, hobby friends, schoolmates and more. Although filters and lists attempt to make better sense of this fragmented information, social networks have not established a method of correlating; our online and offline social lives. To provide an example from a recognized Industry figure: In a recent tweet from Andy Beal (Editor at Marketing Pilgrim and Trackur CEO), he posts:

“LOLing at how my friends have “Twitter Mullets” like me. Business tweets in the morning, party tweets in the afternoon.”

The impression given, is that Google is working diligently on something that could mirror Facebook; but more closely model our real-life interactions. With this in mind, Google likely plans to include some of the (important) missing elements; that would allow our online lives to better emulate our real-world experiences.

Regardless of what Google creates, if Me presents a respectable alternative, that causes Facebook to re-evaluate their failing reputation and death grip on social networking; it would be a win for everyone (except Facebook, of course).