Google aims the Google Phone at Facebook
According to the Wall Street Journal, Google will be announcing its plans for its long-rumoured Google gPhone in just two weeks' time. In contrast to Apple, with its locked iPhone, Google is going totally open - Google will provide a reference model for the phone that any manufacturer can build, and the phone's entire software will be open, including the Operating System itself, enabling anyone to develop any type of software for the device.
Even more interestingly, TechCrunch have been tipped of that Google will also be announcing its strategy for a huge new social network platform that will take on Facebook. Looking at the two rumours, and their timing, it seems that Google's mobile plans might be a lot bigger than many people had realised.
Find out how big after the jump.
The Google phone's features
Google, apparently, wants to make the mobile Internet as easy to use as the Web, and so has designed its mobile phone to provide a range of extra services, such as maps, video-sharing and social networking.
According to the Wall Street Journal's source, Google will announce in two weeks' time advanced software and services that will allow handset makers (expected to be HTC and LG initially, but not limited to those manufacturers) to release Google-powered phones by the middle of 2008.
The Google phones will all have easy access to Google Maps, its search engine, GMail and YouTube. Nothing new there of course, as many of these applications are already available on handsets in one form or another.
Where the Google phone aims to disrupt the market, though, is with huge ambitions for social networking, both on the Web and in the mobile space.
Speaking at the All Things Digital conference in May, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said "The most likely scenario from a Google perspective is to build some, if you will, inspirational platform [applications]; but primarily focus on getting third parties to do it because that's where the innovation will come from...the new model of these phones is going to be person-to-person" with people exchanging videos and other types of data.
In other words, whereas Apple disrupted the mobile market by focusing on the much-neglected user interface, Google is going to disrupt it by focusing on the untapped potential for mobile phone users to share all their phone's content with each other, whether the people they're sharing with happen to be on another mobile phone, or on the Web.
And the reason it's doing this is because it has Facebook squarely in its sights.
Google's Facebook Killer
Google is currently working on its own social network currently codenamed Maka Maka. Google already has a social network called Orkut that's been around for some years, but it's not that popular - only 500,000 people use it in the US.
With Maka Maka, Google is planning on building a social layer of software across all of its applications - Orkut, Gmail, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Reader, iGoogle, and all the rest - and providing a complete open API that will enable developers to build whatever applications they want on top of it.
This will give third party developers the ability to build Facebook-like apps that incorporate Orkut's social graph (i.e. the graph of who's friends with whom), as well as all the other nifty Google apps. Just as Facebook's strength is its giant social graph, which enables new applications to spread across Facebook virally as a user passes it onto many of their friends, so Google hopes to replicate this feature across the Web with Maka Maka
However, whereas Facebook apps can only be used within Facebook, Google's new social network apps will run on any Web site - the new network will be so open, you can take your apps with you and use the Web as a platform, rather than an individual Web site.
You'll also be able to import your data into this new social network from other existing networks, and, crucially, export it to other networks as well, which should help dramatically increase its take up.
Maka Maka and the Google Phone
So what's all this got to do with the Google phone?
Well, the Google phone will bring all the features of the Web onto a mobile device, making the distinction between Web and mobile much less clear than it is now. With the Google phone expected to focus on person to person sharing of content, such as images, maps, videos, etc., Google will effectively be creating a new social network of connected people, all sharing their (Google) content via their Google phone.
Once you link this hardware-based social network (i.e. the set of Google phones that can easily share content between people), to the software-based social network that Google's creating on the Web (Maka Maka), you have a truly seamless social network experience that can be accessed from literally any device anywhere on the planet.
The Google phone takes aim at Facebook
To envisage what this could provide, just think about a mobile version of Facebook. Imagine seeing updates of your friends' status on your phone, next to your text messages; or a single contact book, where you can not only keep track of your friends' phone numbers, but also call them directly from your phone. Update your contact book on the Web, and it's automatically updated on your phone (and vice versa).
Turn your friends into Zombies or Vampires, Superpoke them, or use any of the myriad different applications that third parties will develop for the platform - all from either your mobile phone or the Web, and all integrated tightly inot one seamless user interface.
Now imagine all of this on a completely open platform, where you can take your Maka Maka applications, or even part of the system itself, and embed it into your own Web site. Rather than using these applications in a walled garden such as Facebook (you can't export your data out from it once it's in there), everything's entirely open, making your phone's content exportable to Web sites, Twitter, Bebo, YouTube, even Facebook itself.
Google is aiming at turning both the Web and the Google phone into one giant social network, and doing it in such a way that no-one even notices.
Indeed, this is the genius of the plan. Technology only becomes pervasive when you stop noticing it's there. Electricity, for example, or even Internet access. You just assume it's there when you need it. Google is attempting to do the same thing with social networks, providing one giant social network that's so integral to both the Web and mobile phones that you don't even notice you're using it. And if it's built-into the network, why do you need an external network that provides the same features, but in a less open way? In other words, why will you need Facebook?
The plan is indeed genius. Although the first phase will be announced in two weeks time (TechCrunch speculate on November 9th), it'll only be rolled out slowly, but already some 50 third party developers are thought to be on board.
2007 was the year of the disruptive interface, with the iPhone forcing all manufacturers to focus more on the user experience. 2008 looks set to be the year of the disruptive social experience, with Google forcing manufacturers to look at how their devices can include applications and people more in their own network of friends.
The battle for the mobile market has moved from the devices themselves to the software that connects them, and ultimately the people who use them. The social network was always the killer app that drove the development of network technologies (whether they be mobile, fixed line, telecoms or Web) - it's taken Google to realise this and truly put it into practice.
[Source: Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch]
