Google has acquired Social Search provider Aardvark for $50 million, as reported minutes ago by TechCrunch.  Aardvark is a service that connects people with questions with people with answers by utilizing instant messaging an email.  It integrates quite intelligently with Google Chat, for instance, and the first time you sign up and ask a question, you’re immediately pinged with a friend request from the Aardvark chat bot.  The fact that Google is picking them up says a lot about the type of social features they want to introduce into their products moving forward.
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While Google has been strategizing ways to fend off the Facebook threat for the past couple years, the company has been accelerating efforts in recent weeks. The company began recruiting a number of social web advocates including Chris Messina, Will Norris, and most recently Joseph Smarr who previously worked for Plaxo to create a new “Social Web Team” . Tomorrow, it is expected that Google will take things one step further by launching a social stream within Gmail according to the Wall Street Journal.
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Google has been attempting to compete with Facebook and the social market by attempting develop their social identity.  With the releases of OpenSocial Widgets, iGoogle, Social Gadgets for iGoogle widgets and their connections of Google accounts to Youtube, Blogspot and others, the goal of a unified Google identity is certainly a feasible competitor to a unified Facebook identity.  Google recently announced Google Social Search, and is attempting to make another move on the social space.
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You would think that Google would make their various services work efficiently within Google Chrome, the company’s increasingly popular web browser. While reading an article about Google Earth images of Haiti, I saw the image below which highlights that Google Earth doesn’t work within Chrome. Granted, Chrome is extremely fast on most other things, but wouldn’t Google at a minimum provide support for their own product?
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In an interview with Xconomy, Mussie Shore, one of the developers behind Google Friend Connect, says that “8 million communities have formed with Friend Connect”. What do those communities consist of? The same widget which shows up in the sidebar of this site. The number is massive considering that Facebook Connect is now on “tens of thousands” of websites. I’ve written about the service extensively since it first launched and as of now, it’s being hailed as a great success.
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When Google launched their Friend Connect service publicly last week, they one-upped Facebook by providing publishers with an easy to install widget on their site for instantly creating a community. While the features weren’t robust, it made it so that anybody could instantly implement the service on their site. In contrast, Facebook rolled out their service with the a few partners, many of which have still yet to go live.
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The battle for the social web has been playing out over the past few months but much of it has been invisible to those that are less technical. Today, Google announced that they will begin providing limited access to an API for an OpenID identity provider. This means Google users will be able to login to sites that support OpenID with their Google accounts.

This is a significant announcement for Google and for the open web. While I could attempt to place some sort of arbitrary divider between the open web and the social web, for discussion purposes, the social web is working to make the internet more open. As such both are substantially integrated and can be used interchangeably.

How Does Google OpenID Compete With Facebook?

The battle over single sign on is a significant one. If you haven’t been following OpenID and the single sign on trend over the past couple years, here’s a brief summary: users are finding it hard to remember the logins for every site they register for. As such, companies are racing to provide services that make it easy for users to login with their regular email address.

Facebook is preparing to launch their Connect service to the masses, making it possible for users to register for a site by using their Facebook account and without disclosing any personally identifiable information.
The Pros
There are some clear benefits from using Facebook Connect. For one, websites get access to a user’s news feed and the ability to virally distribute content and user activities through that feed. Second, companies get the “benefit” of placing a Facebook login button on their site. Why is this beneficial? Well, Facebook is rapidly becoming one of the most recognized brands on the web.

The Cons
For any company, using Facebook Connect doesn’t solve all your problems. The primary downside of using Facebook Connect is that you don’t get access to personally identifiable information of that user. I want to have access to a user’s email address so I can contact them in the future. Unfortunately Facebook prevents that. If you want to read more on this check out my article from July about Facebook Connect as OpenID without email.

There Can Only Be One Login

So I really haven’t answered my last question which was: how does Google OpenID compete with Facebook? Well it’s in an abstract sort of way. When you go to register for a site, you are only going to register with one account. Soon enough, you will be able to select from a number of sites that you specify as the center of your identity. As pictured in the image to the left, this is how a theoretical registration form would look.

No longer will you have to enter all your information into fields, instead, that information will come from your identity provider. OpenID is supposed to tie your identity back to a URL but Google has implemented their own version in typical Google style. The point being here is not to debate Google’s implementation of OpenID though, instead to illustrate that your identity can be tied to external accounts.

We’re In it For the Long Haul

In November of last year, I wrote that the email would become the center of social networks. One year later we are seeing this happen as Google and Yahoo! implement new services for the open web. Yesterday Yahoo! announced their open platform which includes a single sign on-like feature and today Google has announced their own version of OpenID support.

This is just the beginning though and ultimately, much of this will require user adoption. I’m guessing that there will soon be a registration “widget” similar to the way that Disqus handles my comments, another party will handle my registrations. As long has I get to have my own database filled with user data, that’s all that matters.

It’s going to take some time but I’d imagine in the next 12 months there will be a huge shift toward a centralized registration system that everybody can use and developers can quickly implement. It’s exciting to see the big players getting involved and while each step can be criticized for its imperfect implementation, I’d assert that this is once again a big step in the right direction.

Yesterday Google rolled out the new version of their Blogsearch product with a surprising new feature: a blog aggregator. The aggregator sorts all news articles being linked to across their blog index based on popularity and time. Many are calling the new Google Blogsearch the “Techmeme Killer” but honestly this is flat out inaccurate. If you browse through the top stories on Google Blogsearch they are all around 17 hours old.

Techmeme in contrast has the ability to show you the latest stories within minutes of them being written. One thing that is clear though is the increasing importance of content aggregators.

The Importance of Aggregators

As content on the web continues to grow exponentially, consumers have turned to content aggregators to filter their information. While traditional media outlets like the New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and others often serve as a filter of content for us, the limitless user-generated content has made it more challenging to filter information.

As the trend from individual websites toward web-based applications continues, one of the most important applications will be the content aggregator. While bloggers and professional journalists have turned to RSS feeds for organizing content, we have realized that content consumption simply doesn’t scale. Each internet savvy consumer currently has their own aggregator that they prefer to visit but I would suggest that all consumers in the information age will soon have their own news aggregator application that they take on the go and access regularly.

The Perfect Aggregator Has Yet to be Made

There is a long way to go before there is a “perfect” content aggregator. One thing that I would suggest is more valuable on Techmeme and Memeorandum in contrast to Google Blogsearch is that the former aggregators include traditional media outlets in their index. In contrast, Google Blogsearch is completely limited to blogs.

In the future I expect to be able to instantly load a single aggregator which includes the most popular items distributed through my favorite media outlets, social aggregators, social networks, and every other source that I visit for the latest content. For now we need to visit our favorite aggregators daily to find the best content. Soon enough, we will have a way to access all our content from a single source.

For now though, Google Blogsearch is yet one more place for finding the latest information being discussed around the blogosphere.

Today Caroline McCarthy posted about a new feature which is being added to Blogger-based blogs and makes them inherently more social. It’s a simple widget-like feature which enables you to view other people in the network that are following that blog. It is extremely similar to the MyBlogLog community features and it extends Google Friend Connect.

One interesting thing about this new feature is that you can import the “Blogs I’m Following” directly into your Google Reader. I’m not quite sure how useful this feature is for me since a large portion of the blogs I’m reading aren’t hosted by Blogger but I figure a lot of people will begin using it. The shift toward a more social web is clearly continuing and Google is one of the companies leading the push.

The only problem with this new feature is that it doesn’t extend to blogs outside of Google. I want a single identity and a single community on the web and this surely isn’t a step in that direction. Then again we can’t make all of our decisions with data portability as the primary end-goal. Now you have yet one more way to interact with people you don’t know on the web thanks to Blogger!

What does the future hold for social blogs? You’ve got me! It’s Friday so I’ll leave you all to figure out the future of the social web. Everybody, including Google, appears to like throwing kinks in the whole equation. With all this socializing taking place on the web it’s too complicated to figure how it all will end up in the end given that it’s the Friday before a 3-day weekend!

If you weren’t spending enough time on the website you are reading, Google is trying to provide a new reason to stay a little longer: Lively. Lively is a new virtual world system for websites. The system is currently only available for Windows users though so for all you Mac users, you are just going to have to wait. What’s so spectacular about these virtual worlds?

Not much really aside from being able to interact with other avatars on any given website. I spent a good hour trying to get Lively working properly yesterday and finally pulled it off after a reboot of my computer. The software appears to work well if you are looking to build a virtual home on your site. I’m just not quite sure how this really helps improve user interaction though.

Rather than actually talking with people via the GChat back-end chat system which users talk over, most people end up moving around and clicking on random items in the virtual world. In theory, each site has their own custom world that they build and different conversations can take place in them. I’m just not so sure that this is the best platform for encouraging dialog. Instead it’s a great way to look at some virtual eye candy.

If you have a PC and want to be part of the Social Times virtual world, check out the embedded virtual world below. I can see this having larger implications in the long run but for now this is clearly an experiment which could end a number of small startups focused on people building their virtual homes. I don’t think this is going to attract many of the users from Secondlife though. We’ll have to wait and see.