In an effort to compete with Twitter and Facebook, Gmail will move from their current chat-included status (where people generally just put up "away messages," if you can remember back to the days of instant messaging). The new status updates will work much more similarly to Twitter and Facebook, as they are expected to include a timeline view of your contacts' status updates.
That sounds great and all, but there are a few big issues:
1) The audience. If Gmail is your primary e-mail client (and for many it is), then you have a lot of contacts. You have a lot of personal contacts. You have a lot of business contacts. You have the contacts of anyone you ever e-mailed at any point, whether you were e-mailing off a resume or asking them what their plans were for Sunday night. As if their weren't enough stories of people who got fired for posting on their Facebook and Twitter, now you have to be careful what your e-mail status says because it will be broadcast to all of your contacts.
Now, there might be controls -- since it hasn't been unveiled yet, we don't know -- that allow you to choose who sees your status, and, of course, it's always the user's responsibility to take care of what they post, but we see the potential for this backfiring. As it stands now, you carefully choose who's LinkedIn invitation you accept. You actively choose to accept friend requests on Facebook, and though anyone can follow you on Twitter, you can easily block them. Once you send an e-mail to someone -- anyone -- they are automatically added to your contact list in Gmail. With all the not-hiring/firing/etc issues that come with Twitter and Facebook, we just see this magnified if this catches on to be big.
2) What about Google Wave? Though one place we looked at said this will be developed in conjunction with some Google Wave extensions, we see it as another foot in the grave for Wave. Google Wave was supposed to be our all-in-one communications tool, with amazing capabilities that were going to transform our lives. (OK, maybe not quite that big, but still, it was touted as revolutionizing communication.) Yet, Google's splitting their market by now including social statuses on Gmail. With e-mail, chat, and statuses, why would anyone switch from familiar Gmail to the unwieldy Wave? We at S2EO think our first prediction of 2010 -- that Wave would die an early death -- is more and more likely to come true.
We'll be interested to see what the end result ends up being after Google's announcement later today, but we think Google may be spreading its fingers too far. From the Google Wave flop to Chrome's meager market share, Google has some serious kinks to work out.
What do you think? Will you try Gmail's status updates -- or do you see it being a problem?
To add to the audience piece, I wonder if gmail users are really looking for the ability to update their status. Generally, don't most users have gmail for the primary purpose of email, not social networking at the level that facebook or twitter provide. As an active gmail subscriber, I don't plan on updating my status or looking for my contact's updates either.
ReplyDeleteAgreed! Gmail is for e-mail, and Facebook/Twitter/etc take care of social networking. Why would people want to throw more of that into the mix, particularly in light of the fact that:
ReplyDeleteA) their overall Gmail audience is bigger and less personal than a status update should be (since all of their contacts are there)
B) their Gmail audience is too small to usefully be a hub for all of their social networking (since Gmail isn't the e-mail client of many people, so many of their friends may not be on it)