Moses Kagan's Aurora Borealis

David Carpe, of passingnotes.com, has an awful post on what he thinks Google is going to do in 2008:What Google is Really Doing for 2008.

Carpe's big idea is that Google is going to flip a switch on what will be the biggest social network in the world by knitting together each of its different social apps (Google Pages, Calendar, Gmail, etc.). He thinks this is going to blow MySpace / Facebook / etc. off the map.

What Carpe doesn't realize is that Google's not cool. It's slick, it works really well, it 'organizes the world's information'. But it's not cool. And social networking sites, at least the ones that target teenagers (the heaviest users), need to be cool. They need to stand for something, whether it's music (like MySpace or Last.fm) or college gossip and hookups (Facebook) or whatever. By standing for something, and basing their design decisions around that one thing, the best networks create communities with distinct feelings.

So, David: Who, exactly, identifies with 'organizing the world's information'?

Labels: facebook, Google, MySpace, social-networking