Google going social?

Posted in the Wall Street Journal today: Google to announce some social feature linked to Gmail allowing users to share media and even update statuses? The least you can say they don't create this irritating hype announcing something ages beforehand.

On the other hand: I don't mind creating status updates for my Facebook account on a (nearly) daily basis but do I want to see status updates on everything I do? Absolutely not.

The reason FB has remained this much fun is because most of the status updates I see in my friends' circle are witty, funny, serious, provocative ... no day-to-day 'i'm having coffee now and after that I will start doing the dishes' kinda stuff. But on my Google mail? And what is Google going to do with that? Run text analysis, sentiment analysis, semantic analysis and get me analyzed to bits?

I don't think so.

A Lijit Wijit.

Look to the left uppercorner of this blog. There is a search box. It's not just a search box, it's a lijit-searchbox. 'It does site search, but it does it better' or somesuch. The idea however is cool: Lijit gathers info from my site, my social content and content from my network. Someone searching for, let's say, the future of the web would not only find my stuff on this site but also my tweets and those of my Twitter friends and the tweets I follow.

The fact that I never heard of them doesn't exactly count in my favor .. apparantly they've been active quite some time already.... and burning some amazing amounts of money as well in the meantime.

I actually stumbled on it while reading an old Chris Anderson blogpost on Long Tails. And as we Dutch speaking cybernauts are very familiar with the 'wij' part of the word wijit my first reaction was to think I had found something weird & local. ('Wij' means 'us'). I apologize :-)