It’s quite true that people spend the most time in email. And they spend most of that time interacting with each-other. We’ve always thought that an ideal environment for social applications is email. Instead of inventing all this other stuff to collect, organize and render the social landscape, perhaps you can use the place people are most social most of the time…
As Saul Hansell reports, this is finally taking place and at Google and Yahoo! no less! Noteworthy from the report Is email the ultimate social environment:
Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.
I don’t have a lot of detail from Google, but I’ve heard from several executives that this is their plan. When I talked recently with Joe Kraus, who runs Google’s OpenSocial project, he said: “We believe there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it more social.” And when I pressed him about the relationship between the social aspects of iGoogle and Gmail versus Orkut or some other social network, he said, “It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand.”
Brad Garlinghouse (Photo: Neal Hamberg/Bloomberg News) Brad Garlinghouse, who runs the communication and community products for Yahoo, was a lot more forthcoming. He didn’t-have dates or specific product details either. But he did say that Yahoo was working on what he called “Inbox 2.0.”
