Give me one year Product Ownership of Google Contacts and I make Google social
Sounds like the worst show-off, I know. Now that I have your attention, please let me explain.
Since Google defaulted on their endeavor to challenge Facebook, comments about “Google can’t do Social” surfaced, again.
Sure, they messed up. But this is only half the truth. The other half consists of the observation that Google strategically retreated to networks around a certain use case…
…and that maybe Google has all the needed assets in place to become Social.
I would build upon Google Contacts.
Why contacts, the unsexiest thing on earth?
Well, what has Facebook that Google desperately wants? The Social Graph. What does a social graph consist of? Actually contacts with lines between them (connections).
If you happen to be one of the 1.2 billion owners of an Gmail account, you already have your contacts hosted on Google servers. Not counting all the other connections you maybe made in YouTube, Hangouts, Google Talk etc.. Google owns a major part of the social graph but doesn’t utilize it.
Everybody has an address book somewhere, some tightly cleaned up, some not so much. But that this can be a powerful graph to built upon should be clear by now: WhatsApp had nothing except the address book.
.vcf as a format of exchange is with us for a long time (my first file is maybe 15 years old) and will certainly be around for some more. If regulation gave us only headaches and entrenched the incumbents, at least it gave us data portability.
You could argue Facebooks graph is not complete (some friends that are reluctant to join) or too complete (some guy where I don’t even remember why we are “friends”). In almost all cases the address book is closer to the truth how we handle our relationships in real life.
Social graphs can be loaded up with interests and likes of brand or things as well. But Google doesn’t need help in that area:
The (static) address book is the starting point. But we want to get to a functioning social network with daily active users. Here’s an attempt to scribble a (simplified) roadmap how to get there.
Step 1 — Visual Overhaul
You have to want to use a product. At the moment Contacts looks like a uninspiring database. I bet money that it does not have a dedicated product owner or team. No, this seems to be a by-product of Gmail — because email programs have to have an address book, right?
Rule of thumb: If the product looks like a blatant copy of the era before (in this case the local address book on Mac/PC), then there’s potential for improvement or maybe even disruption.
Let’s give Contacts a fresh (material) paint. Luckily we can borrow the interaction design from Google+, which did a good job with Circles (Groups will be renamed to Circles). Something to play around with.
Images would be much more center to the uncongested look. Let’s do some homework: It makes no sense that I can manually match faces in Google Photos just so this is being ignored as profile picture in Contacts. But we are Google, we can tap into that large pool of high-res images.
There is nothing uglier than the default Google+ profile page. Google had a product named “Profile” a decade ago. Like a lot of good efforts, it was rolled into the mentioned Google+. Nonetheless, it lacked the customization options.
I would give every user the option to make a one-pager with personal info public. It would be accessible under contacts.google.com/username. I imagine something like about.me or carrd.co. Easy to use with visually pleasing templates — with the option to make modifications.
User benefit: One-pagers are a thing. Especially in digital jobs it helps to represent your work/portfolio in a nice way. They won’t replace CVs in the short-term, but they are becoming increasingly important.
Since we are Google, we can give these pages a ranking boost when it comes to googling the profile’s name. Better you own your digital representation than the internet, right?
Step 2 — Auto-updating contact information
If you were part of the web 2.0 wave you maybe remember Plaxo (RIP). Basically that’s what I would add. When both parties opt-in to the connection, updating myself will send the changes to everyone connected.
User benefit: No need to send around my new number. In turn, my address book receives all changes made by my contacts.
Why did Plaxo fail? Among the many startup traps, one is very painful: Being too early. Back then people had more privacy concerns than now — almost every smartphone app asks to see my contacts.
My guess is that furthermore Plaxo had the known chicken-egg problem: When only 1 out of 100 contacts is on the service, the benefit is too small. Now check how many of your contacts have an Gmail address. In my case it’s approximately 20%. Coincidentally this matches with Gmails market share as of 2016.
Remember the profile pages from Step 1? Now we can add a little “Friend Request” on every page.
Step 3 — Integration of 3rd Party Services
Contacts can be auto-updated by friends, but also by other social networks. FullContact shows how this can be handled.
Now we got access to information that would otherwise unreachable thanks to the various walled gardens. FullContact goes even hunting in the open web for publicly available data & transcribes business cards with OCR. Sounds like a very Google thing to do.
Benefit for the user: All contacts are in one single overview.
Step 4 — “Activities”
Now that the data is flowing in, Contacts gets an Activities view with a history of changes made by my contacts.
- Monica switched heir job title & address.
- Andrew checked in & moved to Colorado.
- Anna has a new last name and profile pic (with an all white dress of course).
- John has his birthday today.
See what im doing here? This is close to Facebooks best invention, the Newsfeed. Just without brands, solely oriented around humans.
With my 1000 contacts something is always happening.
Once we have the traffic and the eyeballs we can get this even further. Why not putting a like or (god forbid) a +1 button next to the status update? Why not set an away status like in ICQ (underrated feature)? Why not built out a business CRM for G suite users (look at what you can do with Covve)?
Step 5 — Ecosystem Integration
Notice that up to this point our Contacts product needed very little help from other established products/teams. Now we can connect other Google services. It simply does not work the other way around.
Rapportive made a nice Chrome extension for Gmail before they got acquired by LinkedIn. It showed meta info for the contact I currently deal with in a sidebar. This should be implemented from Google itself (there’s enough white space in the new layout).
Sidenote: We could have built upon Gmail in the first place, email is also a good basement. But since Gmail is heavily used, prioritization between the different product directions would have slowed things down.
Shared Google Photos could show up in my personal feed as well. Or YouTube videos liked by my friend. It gets even crazier when we bring Android into the mix. Google has access to my messages, phone calls and so on. The activity log of communication gets more complete.
You see, Silicon Valley excitement happens in waves. There was a time when location-based social networks were all the hype. Then came group messaging or chatbots. At some point even local coupon deals were the next big thing.
Of all these fads, I give “lifestreaming” the best chances to resurrect. At the height of its time Zuck rushed in and did what maybe Zuck does best in the world: Buying the right competitor. FriendFeed got shut down, which only made sense, given that they were dis-intermediating the customer relationship to e.g. Facebook.
Yet I still see the potential. Some sort of activity hub is necessary if you have the goal of seeing all your social activity in one place. I think we all could use some consolidation.
If I had started with this vision you would have thought im crazy. That’s why I made a step-by-step plan.
Nothing here is revolutionary. I have other suggestions were you need to invest lots of technical skill and time. This? All has been done before. Google could even buy its way there. The important thing is: Develop such a network organically based on existing assets — and not based on where your competition is at.
