Stowe Boyd’s answer to Google Social Strategy: What should Google do to completely overhaul its social strategy?
Google needs to think about the next stage of the social revolution, not the last one (the one they sat out).
The next stage is the rise of the social operating environment, where social connection is managed intrinsically, like today’s operating environment’s handle files, programs, and network connections.
What we have learned from the open social web is that it’s all about people: people following each other; communicating; sending pictures, invitations, and love notes. We invented the web to happen to ourselves, not to create content.
So Google should push ahead with Android (and drop Chrome OS), building in the primitives that implement sociality. Then, they and other application developers can build on top of a social platform that is distributed, open, and not under the control of a single company. Our social metadata would reside on our hard drives (and cached in the cloud), controlled by us, not in the data farms owned by Facebook.
Yes, Twitter would be a great acquisition for Google in this regard, although they would have to rearchitect it to be a distributed, open solution, although with a very similar user experience to today’s.
Instead of scrambling to build social apps, Google could be the first to lay a foundation for the social world.
PS But I bet it will be Apple, since their history of integrating operating environment, devices, and applications together is much, much more compelling.
What should Google do to completely overhaul its social strategy?
