Has anyone realized Google is creating a Social network right under your feet?

  its not a network until it lets you establish connections to other Google users

The reason is that Google sucks at design. Don't get me wrong: they're incredible with ideas! Some of the designs of their sites work incredibly well because they are conceptually leagues ahead of anything else. Gmail was like that when it came out, and people loved the design for that reason. The original Google search bar. Google Maps, which was ahead of everything for a long, long time. But while they can deal well with concepts, they lack attention to detail.

Google isn't anal. You can tell that some people have it and others don't. Google may have a few people like that in their organization, but they don't have a site-wide dedication to pixel-perfection. They make things that are functional but not beautiful. Their designs don't inspire people, past a point. And that's great if you're making something that doesn't exist yet. The problem is that Facebook exists as a social network, and it's extraordinarily anal. I'd compare Facebook's design to a company like Apple's in terms of depth. Facebook makes missteps more than Apple, but the level of commitment exceeds that of any company I've ever seen.

I'm a pretty outspoken Facebook enthusiast; I've followed the things they've done pretty closely. The things that stand out aren't the major movies, but the minor ones. It was like how when applications all showed on one page, they added the dense set of icons for app navigation. Hover over one and you got a dark dialogue box with white text. Click it and you scrolled down to the application, which further had a dark blue border for several seconds to call attention. Everything was custom-coded - no reliance on previous designs - and worked on every browser.

Three things about that process weren't necessary to work. You didn't need the dialogue box (which was pretty slaved-on to look perfect, since it's been copied since then and every other attempt looks pretty awful). You didn't need the smooth scrolling. You didn't need the border at the end. But the end result wasn't just a link. It was a process. There was an end experience to using this particular thing.

People will accept less-than-perfect for a lot of things. They have extraordinarily high standards, however, for social products. When you talk to people, the process needs to be entirely invisible. If people notice something working, that's a bad sign. Facebook is very, very good for getting out of the way. Look at Facebook's complete featureset at once and you'll realize that most users miss most features, and yet if somebody wants to do something, it's instantly intuitive how they get it done.

This isn't missed by companies. Look at how Disqus blatantly ripped off Facebook's pop-up dialogue design. Not blaming them - it's a good design - but it was still a blatant rip-off. Meanwhile, look at how many people feel the same connection to Google's design. They rip off ideas, like increasing mailbox size or simplifying search pages, but how many actual details stick with people? Not many, because Google's design is bland at best, bad at worst.

Lots and lots and lots of tech people miss this. Partly it's because tech people skim over design more than normal people. Partly it's because tech people have faith in the power of technology alone to fix things. That's not the case. People are very slow to move, and when they do move it won't be with some subtle, slowly-shifting plan of Google's. They will deliberately pick whatever network they move to, if any, and this shift is extremely unlikely.

In 2005 I was working on the quality assurance team for a social network start-up with a pretty neat set of technologies. Part of my goal was to get other people to move off MySpace. The site I was with, Zoints, had a cleaner design, more features, and some parts of it were much more intuitive. People refused to switch. They had friends on MySpace, and they had nothing to gain from switching. Social networks are all about the users, and they were in one basket.

This is important not just as a lesson of how hard it is to make people switch, but of how good Facebook is. Everybody had a MySpace, but they switched over to Facebook anyway. By the time Facebook let high schoolers register, they had 85% of all college students as active users, and half of those were active daily. Now I would suspect it has more than just 85% of all high schoolers registered, and it's leaking down to middle school registration. People at work use it a lot, and as a result entire families are signing up.

Many people here don't ask themselves just how that happened, which is damn shortsighted. I mean, my mother signed up. My grandfather signed up. He comments on my Facebook statuses. My young cousin got an account. And it's not like Twitter, where people want to "tap into a network". It's not like getting a blog. Simply put, Facebook keeps people in contact better than any other application does. It provides an incredible interface. People who know nothing about tech just "get it". They figure out how to write photos and write notes and update statuses and make friends. It's that easy. It's so easy, and so universal, that middle schoolers get them, not just to be cool, but to talk to other kids. Older family members get them to talk to their relatives. My mother currently has a network of 39 friends, including mothers in the neighborhood and friends at work. That's pretty damn impressive.

Centralization means jack shit. Look at Windows Live. Look at how well that worked. Yeah, they have millions of users, but nobody cares. And Windows Live Spaces is extremely well-done. It's one of the better products in the market. Doesn't matter, because even something that's pre-packaged with the computer is harder to use and grasp than Facebook.

Finally: there is no web OS. Get that idea out of your mind, because it won't happen. There are web features that work like things that have traditionally been OS-based, but people say "web OS" like it's a solution to everything. I thought that too, when I was a Windows user, where all the applications were shit. Now I'm on a Mac, and I've realized that iChat is better than Google Talk, and Mail is better than Gmail, and TextEdit is better than Google Docs. Some people might start using these online tools, but only until a better desktop equivalent comes out, and the desktop has incredible advantages. A good designer will be able to make better desktop apps than web equivalents. Look at Mail versus MobileMe (which, for the record, has a better design than anything Google's ever released; Gmail is better than MobileMe's mail in terms of features, but the calendar and address book blow Google's alternatives away, because Google can't design. That's the recurring theme here.)

Google is good at doing a few things. They simplify problems very well. When they don't have a competitor, they do a very good job of consolidating and making good products. The problem is that in the social sphere, they do have a competitor. In email anybody could use anything: I could switch to Gmail and not lose anything I had before. With search I lost nothing by switching to Google. And in both cases, competitors didn't do a thing to catch up until it was too late.

With Facebook, Google's dealing with a company as young and energetic as Google itself. They're up against a competitor that revises and updates and improves even more quickly than Google does with most of their products. It's a competitor that's shifted the social paradigm several times - a competitor that, at this point, is at least two steps ahead of Virb, which is the second-best competitor in the field from a design perspective. Facebook makes Google look like Plaxo: the ugly competitor that nobody loves because it's too goddamn open and not attentive enough on the things that really matter.

Smart thinking.

When I left late last year a lot of divisions/projects were in a hiring freeze, don't know if that's still the case but they've definitely kicked the 100-new-people-in-the-lobby-on-Mondays habit.

> I for one wonder why this sort of "innovation" didn't happen sooner

There are a lot of hoops to jump through for this sort of "innovation". A lot. As in, these social features started being really pushed by VPs and the like way back when Facebook Apps launched, and are just now slowly seeing the light.

Google Profiles don't make for a social network. It's an aggregator at most.