Surprised? Of course not. Google has been dipping its elephant-size toes in the social media pond for some time. Remember Orkut? However, it appears the testing-the-water phase is far behind us. Today’s announcement of the acquisition of Aardvark, a social search service founded by ex-Googlers, is the latest in a series of steps that illustrate the dominance of social media in our online culture today and, more definitively, Google’s commitment to remaining at the convergence of maturing online trends.
While the Aardvark addition pales in comparison with other acquisitions in recent years, such as the $1.6 billion paid for YouTube (now the second-largest search engine, masquerading as a social video-sharing site), it continues to extend Mountain View’s reach into the social web while taking another competitive swipe at perennial runner-up Yahoo! – this time targeting the popular Yahoo! Answers service with which Aardvark competes using a decidedly social media flair. The upstart leverages your own social network connections to provide answers to a user’s questions.
Earlier this week, Google Buzz came thundering onto the social scene offering much the same functionality as Facebook. With Buzz, users can create profiles; embed media from sharing sites such as Picassa, Flicker and YouTube; share information; create groups of friends; post status updates, etc. ¬– all from the comfort of a couple hundred million existing Gmail accounts. While disrupting Facebook’s momentum seems unlikely, the heft of Google’s offering, its reputation for solid technology and its immediate availability to the vast Gmail user base make it a social networking contender worth watching. While I was writing this post, this tweet came across my screen: “Google Buzz makes Facebook look like some college kids’ computer science project.”
One could catch the buzz about Buzz by following the very popular trending topic on Twitter. You could also point your browser to Google and take advantage of Google Social Search. For the last couple months, real-time content from Facebook, MySpace.com and Twitter has been integrated into traditional search results, blending in wall posts, blog entries, tweets and video tags and bringing real-time relevance to users’ queries.
Few dispute that social media is here to stay, that the rise of social networking has truly changed online behavior and that new technologies and evolving trends promise to maintain the dizzying momentum we have seen over recent years. Even fewer should dispute that, however social media matures, Google will be an ever-strengthening force.
I’ve been recommending Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, to friends and colleagues since I read it. Whether or not you agree or disagree with his conclusions, the book is filled with interesting historical and anecdotal accounts of online business model evolutions and the economic, technical and sociological changes that have precipitated an unarguable shift in how we conduct business. Anderson, the editor of Wired Magazine, an active blogger, and the author of the highly regarded The Long Tail, is an entertaining and engaging writer.
I’m trying to conceptualize what 100 billion of anything is. What would a 100 billion of something look like. How long would it take me to drink the coffee made from 100 billion coffee beans? How many pounds of coffee add up to 100 billion coffee beans? To answer this question I naturally go to Google and search for “coffee beans in a pound” and the light goes on. In the past year, according to a recent 
