5 Hopes for a More Social Gmail

Google will reportedly be announcing Facebook and Twitter-like features to be added to its e-mail service Gmail.

Google on Tuesday is reportedly going to unveil a new social service that will incorporate a stream of "media and status updates" into Gmail. These streams would not be public, but would require you to connect with your fellow Google users and may eventually incorporate other Google services like YouTube and Picasa, according to The Wall Street Journal.

While a Google-developed social media stream incorporated into Gmail sounds like an interesting concept, it also sounds like Google is trying to create a closed version of Twitter where your status updates are not public by default, but private. That's a mistake to my mind, and I certainly hope that rumors are wrong on that point.

We will likely find out more soon. Google has sent invitations out to the media for a 10am (PT) press conference set for Tuesday.

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Google on Tuesday is reportedly going to unveil a new social service that will incorporate a stream of "media and status updates" into Gmail. These streams would not be public, but would require you to connect with your fellow Google users and may eventually incorporate other Google services like YouTube and Picasa, according to The Wall Street Journal.

While a Google-developed social media stream incorporated into Gmail sounds like an interesting concept, it also sounds like Google is trying to create a closed version of Twitter where your status updates are not public by default, but private. That's a mistake to my mind, and I certainly hope that rumors are wrong on that point.

We will likely find out more soon. Google has sent invitations out to the media for a 10am (PT) press conference set for Tuesday.

In the interim, here are five things Google should do to make Gmail's rumored social networking stream a winner.

Play Nice With Others

If this is going to work for Google then it's all about tapping into the application programming interfaces (APIs) of other services. If you don't know what an API is, it's basically how third-party twitter clients like Tweetdeck allow you to send and receive tweets, and it's what allows your Twitter account to automatically update your Facebook status.

Google should build on already popular social networking tools (Facebook and Twitter) rather than trying to convince users to build a Google-centric network. I doubt many people want to start from scratch and build yet another group of friends around their Google account. If they did, wouldn't Google's own Orkut social network be the most popular Web site in the world?

To win, Google should follow the path of third-party clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck by incorporating everything they can think of like Flickr as well as Picasa, and updates to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. If Google really is interested in free-flowing information, then it's all about third-party APIs for Gmail's social features.

Another Widget?

The great thing about Gmail is the wide variety of widgets you can add to your interface, but you know what the the worst thing about Gmail is? The wide variety of widgets you can add to your interface. There seems to be a widget for everything from third-party interfaces for Remember the Milk and Twitter to Google Apps and search.

The problem is these widgets can sometimes misbehave, take a little bit too long to load and sometimes they're not even that useful. If Gmail's social features could somehow integrate into my chat widget or find somewhere else to live--like the right side of the inbox--that might be a better solution.

Don't Mention Orkut

Orkut might be a popular social network in places like Brazil, but for the rest of us Orkut is just not that interesting. If Gmail's social features require an Orkut account, then you can count me out. My digital identity is already spread across way too many services as it is. A better alternative would be to encourage me to use my public Google Profile as a dashboard for all my social services, similar to the company's Dashboard for Google services. In some ways, my Google profile is already an index of my digital identity, and since I've already built it, why not give me a better reason to make more use of this profile?