Thursday, 12 March 2009
Google Reader's Comments Feature - Laying The Ground For Twitter Acquisition?
Google has recently added a new feature to Google reader where you can comment on your shared items and see the comments of your friends on their shared items. Also you can see comments people have made on your own content. Google claims that this services is your new ‘watercooler’ cooler online and describes the feature as follow:
With our new conversation feature, you can have private discussions on shared items with your friends. Now, instead of obsessively asking everyone in your office if they have seen that awesome lego cake article you shared last night, they can tell you how awesome you are, right within Google Reader!
This is great, but ‘water-cooler’ is the term people have used for a long time to describe twitter. Asides sharing inane facts about their personal lives, a lot of twitter usage involves people sharing, commenting, ranting and raving about various online news, blog posts, product launches etc. This means we can draw a parallel between twitter and Google Reader. Both allow us to filter online contnet, Google reader does this more directly, where as twitter filters this content through the prism of people we follow. With this added feature, we can see the two services are drawn closer (at least in this content aggregation aspect).
Although the addition of this feature can pretty easily be explained by Google’s constant drive to upgrade and enhance their online services. When viewed along with the ongoing rumours of an intention to acquire Twitter, is it reasonable to assume that this might be a move to test or lay the ground work for Twitter integration?
One fact to consider is that Twitter not only attracts a lot of traffic, it also directs a lot of traffic off to other sites across the internet. If Google did acquire Twitter and monetise it with Ads, maximising time on site would be a concern. Bringing the content to users in the form of Google Reader is a great way to focus Twitter generated traffic to another Google property, and maximise Google ad impressions.
It may seem far-fetched that Google would try to monopolise the way people view content online, but this is effectively what they did with search. Ensuring that a huge swathe of online users will only be able to access online content through the Google search gateway. With Google reader you can access content from your favourite blogs and news resources from the same webpage. With the addition of the new comment feature you can now get ‘social’ with this content too, making short, concise quips about what you like and don’t like a la twitter. If this isn’t part of Google’s planning to eventually buy and integrate Twitter, it’s certainly a cleverly deployed tactic to boost the popularity of Google Reader and counter the advantages that make Twitter so popular.
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