Are online conversations going to be increasingly driven by social media engines allowing infinite modular, dynamic and portable contexts to be created around any existing topic?
Is contextually enhanced conversational marketing the golden path to a profitable future for social media outlets? By looking at how social media and content distribution trends are evolving it is not too far fetched to expect very significant changes to how content will be distributed, marketed and monetized in the coming years.
"The bigger vision is to combine all of Google’s apps and services through Maka-Maka. Google already has so much data on you, depending on how many Google apps you already use. It just needs to bring everything together. Your contacts are in Gmail. Your feeds are in Google Reader. Your IM buddy list is in Gtalk. Your upcoming events are in Google Calendar. Your widgets are in iGoogle. And don’t forget about your search history.
Over time, Google will connect all of these together in different ways, along with data about you from other social services across the Web, and give developers access to the social layer tying all of these apps together underneath.
The real killer app for Google is not to turn Orkut into a Facebook clone. It is to turn every Google app into a social application without you even noticing that you’ve joined yet another social network.
"
Source: All Things Digital - Boom Town - Kara Swisher
Google's own upcoming Maka-Maka project appears to be targeted not only at leveraging the power of highly distributed social content and contextual advertising but also at riding the mobile content distribution tsunami that is just ushering in.
Content media expert John Blossom analyzes Google's code-named project Maka-Maka and attempts to make sense of where the search engine giant may be headed with this move.
Intro by Robin Good
Google Readies Embeddable Social Media Platform: Will "Maka-Maka" Make Inroads?
by John Blossom
With Silicon Valley sprouting more Hawaiian-esque words for social media products than a Trader Vic's menu it's only appropriate that Google should be betting large on a social media with a new project code-named Maka-Maka.
As detailed by TechCrunch Maka-Maka is an effort to bring social media capabilities and other Google content applications to any Web platform and application rather than trying to create just another standalone portal.
To some degree this may seem like sloppy, seconds after having lost a bidding war for Facebook to Microsoft, especially as Google's own Orkut social media portal has barely dented U.S. markets.
But there may be some strengths to Google's methods if they can get them rolled out in a timely fashion.
The general Maka-Maka concept is to use social media as the principle platform from which one accesses other Google applications and which in turn can be embedded on other media platforms, in essence turning any Google application or other application into a social media-enabled application, complete with Google's own library of widgets already enabled through the iGoogle personalized interface.
Add in Google's contextual ad capabilities and there's the potential for a new type of universal distributed platform for consuming content that puts social contexts at its focal point.
Instead of locking people into a particular portal Google provides a trusted login, core functionality and the ability to embed a common framework for conversational content anywhere.
Then again, it could turn out to be what it seems to be at first glance: an after-the-fact attempt to pull together, on a patchwork basis, a very disparate group of Google applications that were never constructed with social media in mind.
Facebook has its own ideas for a social media operating system as well, mind you, but at least it would start with a viable community built around bona-fide relationships at the center of its capabilities rather than having to wish that network into being.
But there's one key aspect to Google's gambit that may help it to propel its plans for Maka-Maka forward more quickly than may be envisioned at first: mobile markets.
With a strong mobile platform about to be launched and powerful content and applications built off of Google Maps that are naturals for social networking there's every reason to think that Maka-Maka may be first and foremost the gateway into mobile social media that can bridge together voice conversations, messaging, email ecommerce and user-generated content far more rapidly than any other mobile provider.
With Facebook under Microsoft's wing there's going to be an already established mobile platform on which Facebook's network of users could be deployed rapidly, so this is going to be a race with many dimensions - many of which could just as easily favor Microsoft's increasingly savvy online strategy.
Much of this will become more clear over the next few weeks as Google reveals more about both its mobile capabilities as well as its social media plans, but expect the initial announcements about Maka-Maka to be underwhelming until Google's mobile plans become more explicit.
Once those kick in Maka-Maka may just turn out to be a very interesting way for the world to carry on its conversations in more online and mobile venues than any other provider - if it can finally manage to draw a critical mass of audience share for its social media efforts.
Google's efforts to date don't augur well for that likelihood, but as Google seeks to open up mobile markets to more universal and cross-network access it may yet get the upper hand on truly universal social media.
Originally written by John Blossom for Shore on October 29th 2007 and entitled "Google Readies Embeddable Social Media Platform: Will "Maka-Maka" Make Inroads?"
Find out more about John Blossom and the management consulting services of Shore Communications Inc., covering the business of enterprise, media and personal publishing at Shore.com.
