Google goes for more markets: too much too quickly?

Rodney Gedda

Rodney Gedda is the former deputy editor of CIO and former editor of Techworld.

A month after Google’s Nexus One smartphone announcement the search giant has thrown itself into the social networking and ISP markets. Not to mention the talk about a Google tablet. Google is now quite committed to a number of disparate products and services – everything to mobile operating systems to search appliances – and continues to leverage its more mature services to catapult new ventures.

The thing to remember is that Google does not yet monetize any of these new products and services.

While it’s clear why Google is moving in these directions – they all lead to the advertising cash cow – what is not clear is whether Google will continue to invest and support is swag of new products and services if they don’t facilitate enough ad dollars.

Another doubt hangs over Google’s ever-expanding tentacles – will the information it continues to collect remain private?

In the case of Buzz people have already expressed concern about it being opt-out. Take your base of e-mail users and add in a social networking application that potentially shares contact information be default? Not good privacy form at all.

One of the people I follow on Twitter (@auxesis) wrote today: “really hoping I can disable Buzz in my GMail, otherwise I will have to switch away from it. I do *not* want reader fluff in my mailbox.”

The next tweet…

“Phew, ok, you can disable buzz by clicking the “disable buzz” link in the gmail footer.”

This “let them opt-out if they don’t want it” mentality has massive implications for the suitability of Google applications, especially in the business space.

In fact, I just logged into my Gmail account and discovered I was “automatically following” three people from my address book. And two people are “already following” me - how about that.

Facebook cops enough stick over its default privacy settings. If Google wants to play in that space it can always look at what others are doing and follow suit.

Do you get the buzz about Google’s direction? Where will it lead us?