Google’s Endgame

So what is Google ultimately trying to create? What is their end game? Are they responding to the Facebook threat, etc.?
John Battelle has Google’s Plan to Out Facebook Facebook.
Michael Arrington has Google To “Out Open” Facebook On November 5.
Reporting on a secret meeting at Google on Sept. 20th:
“The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.” …
“And Google is also considering allowing third parties to join the party at the other end of the platform – meaning other social networks (think Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and thousands of others) to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs.
And that is a potentially killer strategy. Facebook has a platform to allow third parties to build applications on Facebook itself. But what Google may be planning is significantly more open – allowing third parties to both push and pull data, into and out of Google and non-Google applications.”
The remarks from many web bloggers and luminaries in the comments are interesting too.
If you’re unaware of all of Google’s properties that can be mashed up here, check out this chart or here and review Google Labs.
Now this speculation starts to approach some of the things I’ve been talking about lately. It won’t hapen instantly but it will happen fast. An awful lot of social data will become available to library developers too…
Stephen