Google Socialstream??

"Socialstream is the result of a Google-sponsored capstone project in the Master's program at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. "

This seems to be a nice platform to integrate a number of Web 2.0 UG content at one place. Lets see how this pans out.

I am still bitter about Yahoo! 360. Yahoo have more user generated content than any other website. They were at the right place in the right time to bring it all together and come up with a true social networking platform. And they gave us 360, which sucked big time. Now facebook is doing what Yahoo! could've done with 360 and they are building content from ground up. But I do not feel it is adequate enough to last till the last mile.

I'm sure this war is going to be interesting.

In UGC domain, Google has youtube and blogger for video content and text content. Yahoo has literally unlimited user generated content from music preferences, movies and local reviews, flickr for images and also a lot of professional content, that it can pull together to give us a wonderful platform. I still have hopes for Yahoo! They still are in the best position to pull it off.

Google's unwanted child!!

I keep hearing about the failure of google and yahoo in the social networking arena. That myspace and facebook has taken over. But a quick look at the alexa rankings reveal that orkut.com is 8th in the rankings. And it has been that way since last october.

But why is it considered a failure? coz it doesn't make money?
True, but youtube doesn't make money either. Why does it get all the hype and media coverage and most important, a very superior treatment from its parent, The Google. Why is the youtube evolving so rapidly with wonderful new features all the time, while the orkut is more or less the same for over an year.

Simple, orkut is popular in third world countries and would never have enough money to prompt google to increase spending on this neglected child. In US, it stands at a distant 30 in the rankings and probably skewed towards the immigrants rather than americans. So we don't care about them?

If Google has the noble intentions of making the world a better place, why not spend some research dollars on Orkut and make it more stable and add some desperately needed features to it, so that the millions of loyal Orkut user can have better experience?

Answer: Show me the money!!!!