Is Google a Social Misfit?

Google is the brilliant, introverted kid who aces all the exams.  Not much for gossip or pedestrian concerns.  He believes "the fool speaks, and the wise man listens."  Throw a physics or chess problem at him, and he'll methodically uncover the solution.

The fact that Google is/was? able to dominate the Internet is a credit to the inherent intelligence of mankind. Google saved us from the AOL walled-garden.  Man was the AOL version of the Internet lame.  Google demonstrates that people do not need to be feed a simplistic view of the world.  Google's genius is in its appeals to the inquistive nature of humans.  Sadly or appropriately, Google's day in the sun is getting cloudy.  Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are drawing people away from the Google free-form search for information, and into the closed networks where a torrential downpour of data and images floods our attention.  Google requires a more cerebral thought process, whereas Facebook and YouTube tend to provide a more passive experience.  You could argue that without active updates and posts, that Facebook and Twitter do not exist.  In reality, the networks of friends and followers that each one individual is linked to is so massive that social networking experience is often dominated by consumption of the aggregated information flowing from these connections.

The difference between a Google or Wikipedia process versus the Facebook/Twitter one is akin to reading a book versus watching TV.  One thing is certain. Social media is critical to the success of companies and individuals alike.  Can Google go against its nature and discover a way to lead in the social web?  Here's a contender that we have not considered for a while, Yahoo!  Yahoo! has done a surprising good job of revamping their site and incorporation social elements.  It would be something if Yahoo! could ride the social wave back to the top.  Unlike Google, Yahoo!, although bright like Google, is more comfortable being the cool kid in the class. 

Although Facebook is the odds on favorite in this battle, Google's one social smash success - YouTube - may provide Google the platform to get back into the game.  Yahoo! is the darkhorse.  If people decide it is easier to centralize their authoritative news and information with a mashup of their social services - Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare, then Yahoo! could contend with Facebook as the primary dashboard for the web.  Facebook will likely be racing to cut off this end-run by Yahoo! by bringing in authoritative services into its closed network.  Maybe Facebook should buy AOL.  They could use the slogan, "yeah, we're a walled garden too, but we don't suck."

There is a Forture article about the Google dilemma "Is Google Over?" that should be read for inspiration for this blog post.