Google has likely been building this up internally for a while, as reported by the tech media:
The problem with Google Profiles as a social network is that it’s not social.
Google Profiles lacks the equivalent of Facebook’s “Wall Posts” and “Status Updates.” (Profiles has a status message, but only people on your Gmail Chat buddy list can see it.)
And this is why Google should buy Twitter.
I tweeted last night that this is a “data portable” network for geeks, but on further reflection, it is not even that. This is simply a portal that brings together Google services in addition to RSS feeds. So this is no different than a “homepage” of old with an easy way to integrate RSS from other services. It is also not really that different from Facebook’s public profile either.
But, like Orkut, I don’t think this is really going to fly. Why? Well, status updates, which are the core of Twitter and the “central feature” of Facebook are missing (as noted) and to add other content – videos, photos and the like, the user has to go to another service and then come back to the profile to add it. This is something that the casual users of Facebook are not going to be doing anytime soon.
The other thing that I noticed – is that there is no “Friend Connect” widget to be seen. I had added one of those to my site, so it would have been really cool to see my blog show on my profile somehow, but all I could do is link it. So without a way to find and browse to friends, Profiles is likely going to sputter as well, because as annoying as the “suggested friends” “feature” is in Facebook, it does help keep people in the system. The other part that is missing is some way to asynchronously see what content your friends have added recently. So while I might see the tweets stream by from my friends, I would have to actively go to their profile to see what they have done/added. This is something that finally slipped into the new Facebook design as “Highlights” – sitting right under the ads.
Google Profiles does have one thing going for it, for those who are rather geeky and want to dump content into services scattered around the web and have a single profile (or portfolio – nee eportfolio – ) that grows without much attention, this is something that might be useful.
What else might be useful? Well when people search for people using Google… guess what will/might come up first? Not the Facebook public profile, not the Twitter feed… yup… Google’s profile.
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