Google Stealthily Building a Social Network?

Google Friend Connect is the latest in a trend of big media companies who are ‘opening up their users data’ to help make the web more social. Facebook recently scored big by securing a deal that would allow Digg, Hulu and Discovery users to sign up and authenticate using their existing accounts. This is huge because it opens up all of Facebooks users to those services, allowing them to quickly create profiles and to use the same username and pass across all four services. Not to be out done, Google is prepping the launch of their own portable identity service Friend Connect. But with this service, could they be poising themselves to make the web one huge social network?

Let’s look at the evidence:

• Google Profiles
• Google Friend Connect
• Picasa
• Jaiku
• Google Chat
• Blogger
• Gmail
• iGoogle
• Google Reader

The most telling evidence is Google Profiles which, like ClaimID, is an attempt to allow people to ‘claim their identities’ online. With Google Profiles you can link to your personal and professional web properties, add every place you’ve ever lived and worked, add your phone number and sync your Flickr or Picasa account. All Google accounts now have a profile. Did you not know? That’s because Google didn’t really publicize it. However, you can customize your personal profile here. I don’t know about you, but the image below sure looks like a social network profile to me.

If you notice the space next to “About Me”, it’s perfect for adding several tabs worth of data. What other Google service uses tabbed data for widgets? That’s right, iGoogle.

iGoogle allows users to create custom home pages that integrate their Google Apps with other widgets made by third-party developers…a little bit like what Facebook’s Application service. GoogleChat which conveniently finds itself located in the inboxes of the millions of Gmail users. It also integrates with many existing IM platforms which keeps users engaged…some thing Google would want so they can sell ads with AdSense.

So they’ve got Profiles, they’ve got custom home pages and gChat. They’ve also got one of the largest blog networks in the world with their property Blogger.com.

With Jaiku, they have potential competitor to Twitter and FriendFeed, especially if they integrate it with their chat application.

Google News and Google Reader provide the perfect mix of aggregation and information, and if you combine the sharing feature in Google News with the Notation features of Google Search, you begin to see the beginnings of a bookmarking tool to rival Delicious.

But the ultimate indicator is what they’ve done with Google Friend Connect. Google has quietly rolled this application, currently open to invitation only. It essentially turns any blog into a social network. It’s Claim ID + My BlogLog + XFN. I recently spotted it at StartupAfrica.

Google Friend Connect (lower right corner) turns any blog into a more social community…

Couple all of this with their translation services like Google News in Arabic and it doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots. A social network with all of this integrated would not only be massive, it would be multilingual.

Could Google be planning to unify all these apps at some point in the not too distant future?