St Edmonds Lab

(chart from alleyinsider.com)

It seems like just a few years ago that Google was a cute little company with a funny name and logo. “Look! You can type something into the box and it brings back results so fast!. Goooooogle. Even saying it makes me smile”.

Ok - so that was only a few years ago. And while I don’t want to make this an “impending doom” post, there’s a couple of things lining up that are worth keeping an eye on. With AdSense, Google already monetizes a page better than anyone else. They have made scraping a page for context and serving up relevant ads a Web 1.0 cliche. But on November 6, Facebook will announce what many expect to be their ’social ads’ plan (ads based on profile and personal content). This will be the next generation of commercialising online activity, and given Facebook’s cohesive structure, and the trust consumers have shown in offering up their data, it will be extremely compelling. But even despite the site’s astronomical growth (in Australia up to 1.75m UVs) it only accounts a for small percentage of overall web usage. The rest of the web’s out there and still growing too.

Now back to GOOG. Yesterday this press release surfaced on John Battelle’s blog “Google Launches OpenSocial to Spread Social Applications Across the Web. Google has long been rumoured to be making a bigger social play (why not?) and thankfully they’re not simply making the ‘big in Brazil’ Orkut more international. Actually they are, but that’s a small component. Google have announced that they have developed APIs to connect a range of ’social hosts’ with core functions across profile information, friends information and personal content. At launch these hosts will include Linkedin, Hi5, Friendster, Plaxo, Ning and, of course Orkut. With these participating networks, developers can now reach a dispersed audience across a range of sites using common applications and functions. More soon on the kinds of things we can expect from developers when OpenSocial goes live soon.

So a united social profiling play, combined with a vast audience of advertisers in the AdSense platfrom clambering to reach you in a targeted way. That’s big. I wonder if there’s anything that AT&T (#4 above in the ‘biggest companies in the US’ chart) has planned of a similar scale. But to quote a famous keynoter: “there’s one more thing”. Mobile. Whether the Google Mobile OS comes out in two weeks or next year, things are becoming clearer.

Google could soon have another killer app. Search has been um.. reasonably good to them. But social networking digitally is now a mainstream lifestyle activity. For some it’s replacing email, for others it have become their trusted, always-on address book. But the mobile has been the predominant tool for communication, and mobile internet access (supported by unlimited data plans) is quickly becoming an everyday thing. So here’s a formula to ponder:

Google x (social + mobile + profile advertising) = y

Choose from:

a) y = a completely socially integrated location-based mobile address book that is aware when my friends available online or for a call, that knows if they know each other (and whether they like each other) and mutates automatically with their every move. The beginning of the inevitable migration of social networking from the confines of the PC to your pocket.

b) y = cheaper advertising-supported mobile access where flattening carrier revenues are propped up by the first killer mobile ad model that actually works. A defining moment for global carriers.

c) y = too much for consumers. the beginning of the great anti-Google backlash…

Update:
AdAge reports about consumer associations and activists such as the EFF starting to rally for a Do Not Track-List, allowing users to opt out (like a white list) of all behavioural targeting.