"Later this week, Google will unveil add-ons to Gmail that let people post and view messages about their day-to-day activities, according to a person at Google briefed on the company’s plans. This simple tweak to Gmail will let Google mimic the status updates that have driven much of Facebook and Twitter’s success, as people return to the services again and again to check out what their friends and co-workers are doing." - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

There's so much Buzz in this area... - Paul Buchheit

Apparently it's being announced tomorrow at 10am: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archive... - Paul Buchheit

This would be extremely difficult to get right. Making the assumption that correspondents (even frequent correspondents) equate to a privacy-relaxed social circle would be a mistake. I hope they have something more elegant than a manual 'block this person from seeing my posts' mechanism. I'm looking forward to seeing what it is. - Kevin Fox

great. all we needed. yet another Productivity Killer. Which reminds me how dead is Google Wave? - Nikos Kouremenos

Wave is not dead. It's a completely separate team from Gmail. - Paul Buchheit

Nikos might mean the activity on his own Wave account. I logged in to Wave last Tuesday and found that of the 100 or so of my friend who gave Wave a try, none of them seem to be doing anything anymore (at least that they add me to). I'm sure it's thriving in some small circles, and perhaps that's what it's intended for, but I haven't seen any general uptake. - Kevin Fox

That's cool - Xitong Liu

Wave on Chrome is probably 5x faster than it was 2 months ago. I just noticed that last week. That means for the first time I can use it for real work. - Daniel Dulitz

Wave is not a social network, and was never intended to be one, afaict. It is an incredibly useful tool for groups (work or otherwise) to stay in sync, have complex discussions, build design docs, etc., where giant email threads tend to turn into clusterfscks. @Daniel: Yeah, I notice they seem to have pushed on-demand wave rendering, which has made a huge difference in performance. - Joel Webber

Wave just hurts my head. It feels like they overreached without anyone pushing them back on the usability front. - Kevin Fox

Wave is a great alternative to mailing lists for developers to collaborate. I'm not sure it's a replacement for social aspects of email, it's more a replacement for work-aspects of email. - Ray Cromwell

So much buzz, indeed http://blogoscoped.com/archive... - Jérôme

I agree with Kevin, this will be VERY difficult to get right.. I haven't been impressed with Google's social features to date.. they seem more like an after thought added as a disjoint layer than a solution. If Google Reader's comments and contact/group mechanism is any example it will be a nightmare. Friend Connect is missing some very basic functionality that makes it a non-starter out of the gate. I hope they get this one right!! - Chris Myles

Yup. As I mentioned though, *how* you define that list will be important. FB, Twitter and other social sites let you grab your Google contact list and checkmark which ones you want to add to your social circle. Can Google do something smarter than a fully manual opt-in process? I'm just looking forward to their take on the problem. - Kevin Fox

Gary, that works for privacy during *broadcast* but not during conversation. For example in Reader the person who shares the post determines who gets to see it's comments. If I want to add to a conversation and share the same comment with my friends (and guarantee they'll see it) I have to duplicate the comment and add it to my own share. That's not easy or social !! - Chris Myles

Seems to me like the Gmail team is borrowing some ideas from the Wave team more than it does an effort to transition Gmail into being a Facebook or Twitter clone. I'm looking forward to seeing how it will work. - Mark Davidson from BuddyFeed

Most importantly, how will it work for people who don't use Gmail? Email is (more or less) zero-sum. You're not going to get people to change their email client and email address just to have access to the social features their friends might be using on Gmail. There would need to be a "Gmail+Social-Gmail" experience for people who have friends that use Gmail as a social network but who don't use Gmail themselves. - Kevin Fox

This could be the place you're looking for, Kevin http://www.google.com/s2... (by the way, does anyone know why Google still show services here http://www.google.com/s2... that have been disconnected from Friendfeed months - if not years - ago?) - Jérôme

That's a pretty cool page, Jerome! I hadn't seen that one before. - Kevin Fox

Kevin have you seen Google's social graph API (http://code.google.com/apis...)? I think Jerome's link combines contacts and the social graph API.. - Chris Myles

Links overload here: 246+ direct, 629 secondary connections. - Jérôme

Social graph API applied to Kevin: here are all his followers http://socialgraph-resources.g... - Jérôme