Mountain View, California — In an attempt to popularize it nascent social media networking site, global search engine titan Google looks close to unleashing Google+ on the enterprise front. The search engine giant is withdrawing the social features of its Google Reader application in preparation of the RSS feed reader’s imminent integration with the Google+ social network, the company said Oct. 20.
The unfortunate news has been met with a mixture of excitement, apathy, and dread. The problem is that Google is withdrawing the current crop of social functions from Reader–and in doing so, they are basically altering the way most of us use Reader, and in the process they are sending a huge archive of curated posts and shares and comments down into the void.
Google Reader entitles users to subscribe to receive links to content from some of their favorite news sources, including blogs and traditional publications. One the darlings of Internet geeks, RSS readers have been cast aside by more forward-looking digerati for Twitter and other real-time services, including Facebook and Google+.
Ultimately, Google will cast aside friending, following and shared links to blogs in Reader, which like Google Search, Gmail and Maps before it, is also getting a brand-new design. That remake will include tight integration with Google+, which the search engine provider is making the main focus of its social software tools.
“We are going to make tighter integration between Reader and Google+, so you can share the best of your feeds with just the right circles,” wrote Google software engineer Alan Green in a blog post, adding that Reader users can start creating Reader-centric Circles on Google+.
Addressing the Web 2.0 Summit last week in San Francisco, Vic Gundotra, a Google engineering senior vice president, mentioned that Google+, the company’s budding social media network, soon will be integrated with Google Apps, the company’s cloud-based office suite. The company on Thursday accidentally leaked information on the update to Gmail, which is a key feature of Google Apps.
All signs indicates to big changes coming not only for Google+ but for Google Apps. A Google spokeswoman on Friday would only say that the company is “working fast and furiously” to bring features in Google+ to Google Apps. She declined to say when the integration would take place.
“If I were a betting man, I would bet that the enterprise is their target,” said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. “I think that they have positioned Google+ as more enterprisey than Facebook. With Google+’s ability to be more selective about setting up different circles, corporate users could set up circles for different customers, colleagues or business associates.”
He added that while Google is keenly concentrating on social networking, the company also has set its sights squarely on the enterprise. By combining Google+ and Google Apps, the company could pull its two focuses together.
“Google sees socialization and collaboration as the obvious way to gain even more market share and mind share in their lines of business,” Olds said. “It is all interrelated with them, I think. Their apps will all tie in together with the collaboration people can do with Google+, and it all ties to search.”
Nevertheless, Google does perceives that there is an inherent risk in angering some users by quashing Reader’s social features, so the company is letting users export their subscriptions, shared items, friends, likes and starred items.
In addition, users already follow and share links on Google+ through the Circles sharing construct, so allowing users to easily share Reader blog posts and news stories in Google+ should be a natural activity for most users. Indeed, Reader’s consolidation with Google+ merely continues the pattern Google has created in integrating the social network with the company’s search, YouTube, Gmail and other existing tools.
Moreover, Google+ is getting traction, having accrued over 40 million users since it was unleashed in late June. Users have also shared more than 3.4 billion photos in the last 100 days.
With Google+, the search titan is engaging rival Facebook in the war for users’ attention. Besides, the current social media network Facebook has more than 800 million users, some of whom use the service an average of eight hours per month. That is a lot of eyeballs, time and ad clicks that Google is not getting.
Google+ is getting several enhancements over the coming weeks, said Gundotra, tasked with running the Google+ effort. For instance, Google+ will eventually entitle users to publish content under pseudonyms, allow businesses to build brand pages and incorporate with Google Apps. Perhaps most importantly, Google will release APIs to allow developers to build applications that work with Google+. Ultimately, Google+ will be knitted across all of Google’s Web services.
“By Christmas, you will start to see it all come together,” Gundotra promised at the Web 2.0 Summit.