So Om Malik thinks that Google is out of big ideas. I'm not sure this is true. What he's noticing is a lot of copycat apps coming out of Google, which is a valid complaint. But Google is so big that it can concurrently churn out clones as well as develop unique products. I'm not concerned that their creativity is lacking. What I do think Google does wrong is missing a bigger picture. It's a safe bet that internally the big picture of a massive collection of user data is going splendidly. There is web browsing habits, video preferences, feed subscriptions, and so much more. Add it all up, and there is no limit to the precision with which advertisements could be directed. But externally, users are left with a bunch of disconnected experiences. None of them are exactly wrong, it's just not getting any of the same synergy. Google should take a step back and devote less effort on new ideas in order to solve this. What they really need to do is start folding several of their old ideas into comprehensive products.
Facebook is a good model. There is not surprisingly a fair amount of overlap with Google. But the difference is that Facebook manages to fit everything into one cohesive site. It's an activity stream, and any page is just a different view of that stream. I'm not saying that Google should necessarily adopt the activity stream as a primary concept, but they would benefit greatly from some way to represent its different services in some kind of homogeneous, combined view. Stop making users distinguish between concepts of email, docs, feeds, news, and such. Just present everything together and let people view and create content. I'm not saying these different concepts of data need to be completely forgotten, but they are abstractions that don't add much benefit. What matters are links, meta data, and read/write permissions.
I really thought iGoogle was going to accomplish this. In fact, I formed many of these ideas by misinterpreting an article about iGoogle (not sure where it was, probably TechCrunch). iGoogle is not living up to its potential, but it is a decent start at a true Google suite that is more deeply integrated than apps connected by navigation links. It is a test of modular, uniform JavaScript widgets (called gadgets here) in a useable layout. The main widget displays feeds and resembles Google Reader. Gmail is here too and works fine. Yet it has not caught on. Is this a marketing problem, or is iGoogle failing in some way? Well, both are a problem, but it might be a lot more popular if it stopped sucking so much. For one, the branding and UI are sub par. Also, the choices are overwhelming. It would be useful to be able to share layouts and configurations so that people could instantly satisfy niche cravings for content or functionality, or have an intelligent layout in the same vein as Microsoft's ribbon menu, that morphed to fit your usage. iGoogle's downfall is that it replaces Google's beloved spartan landing page. Imagine if Windows Live replaced the Windows Start Menu! iGoogle needs to slim down in order to wear the home page bathing suit, both in load time and graphical clutter. I think iGoogle may still be salvageable and get closer to some sort of all-encompassing interface. I don't know how active development is on it, though.
Another avenue is embedding more into the search results page. The contextual results with extra facts and functionality are great. It might be interesting to take this to the extreme. What if you could read and write email from the search results page? Currently, you can search your email or the web. Might as well just mix the results together to see what happens. The caveat here is that it has to practically read your mind so that you still get plain search results when you want. This is a serious problem, as seen with the controversial search wiki features. That clutters the interface as it is.
So all Google needs is one more big idea--to put their wonderful apps into one usable interface. Google already has a huge social graph, like Yahoo does, and would do well to capitalize on it. So far, they have been pretty disorganized: Gmail contacts, Open Social, Google Reader Shared Items and the mini-profile that goes with it. All of these provide marginal benefit, but it would be so much better to get one social plug-in that for all of these uses. A few months ago, Yahoo pulled the switch and made their user base into a giant social network, so I see no reason Google can't. Given that you have a clear view of who you're interacting with, shouldn't you have a clearer view of what you're doing? We currently hack existing apps for new uses, such as blogging by email or taking polls on Twitter. But you still have to jump around because not everything is accessible through any one technique. What I'm proposing is to jam all the functionality of different services, in this case a number of Google's, into one page. Widgets (HTML, JS) are the obvious solution, but what would really seal the deal is to have ways for all the widgets on the page to interact and share data. And that is pretty hard and pretty much has to be done case-by-case. Put a map and an image in an email. Put an email and an image on a map (inside another email). Working with the API it is possible to combine data objects in custom ways, but users often don't get a chance like that in the official app. It's a tall order, but it would be incredibly useful to have the best of Google's apps available to use across each other on the same page in an intuitive UI. Mozilla's Ubiquity accomplishes something in this neighborhood fairly well today. It provides a single interface for a number of utilities, such as search, translation, and bookmarking. It's easy to just throw a bunch of things next to each other, like iGoogle, and there are merits to that. But if Google's goal is to organize and display (and create) the world's information, they should figure out how to show it all together.
