Techcrunch reports that Google Docs is getting more and more like Microsoft Office. And soon it will have all the most important features of its desktop counterpart. That’s fine but I believe Google has chosen a wrong path.

You see: at uberVU we love Google Docs. We do most of our writing inside Google Docs. And we do it because of the sharing capabilities, not because of the extended set of publishing features. We don’t care about all the fancy features that Google is adding to make it look and behave more like Word. We don’t care about those because we rarely print anything that we write from inside Google Docs. However, we do publish a large percent of the documents. Online. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Email, Online Magazines etc. And a web page is so… so different than a printed page that I am wondering: Why doesn’t Google make a good editor … for the online world?

Most people see the distributed web as a chaotic and uncontrollable space. We see it as a big opportunity. And it is not just us. Bellow is an article by Daniel Waterhouse (sector partner at 3i Venture Capital).

One of the enduring and real elements of the web 2.0 discussion is the new way in which online businesses are reaching their audiences. This has spawned some buzzwords, such as ‘open APIs’ and ‘widgets’, and has added a layer of complexity into building an online business. Those who succeed in harnessing these techniques command a competitive advantage. As an investor I am always looking for teams which react fast to changing market dynamics - effectively utilising the distributed web is one such test of reaction speeds. But what does this all mean?

In the first iteration of the web, it was enough to publish your web site and try to drive people to it, to use your service and buy your goods. Perhaps you closed a few deals to get other sites to carry a version of your service and you certainly spent some money on advertising. All of these channels to get people to your site cost money - unless you stumbled upon the ingredients of word-of-mouth marketing which a few notable sites (e.g. Google) did.

In the past few years, however, several high-profile examples of new ways to get your user in front of your product have emerged, including open APIs and widgets. APIs are application programming interfaces that allow people to interact with your product/service/data/technology.

Opening up part of it to people outside of your organisation may sound like a recipe for losing control. However, when done successfully it can be very powerful. The best example of where this works well is Google Maps. Littered across the web now are Google Maps embedded in other web sites. The site owner has not made a deal with Google but has just utilised the open API it provides. In return, Google receives free marketing for its product on thousands of web sites (and will most likely start embedding adverts into the maps at some point and make money from this free distribution).

Widgetising your product involves allowing the mainstream internet user to embed your product into their personal page (blog, MySpace page, etc). YouTube is a great example - on every page is an ‘embed’ code which users can insert into their pages. YouTube gained huge traction early on via users viewing videos on MySpace pages which contained YouTube embeds. Several other large businesses have been built in this way, where the user interacts with their product on a blog or MySpace page.

This new form of distribution is very cheap and can be incredibly powerful. The downside is the inevitable loss of control and also dependence on the policies of the likes of MySpace which have been known to ban certain embeds. Using these channels effectively will become a core competence of many online businesses, especially as audiences fragment to more niche locations in the ever expanding world wide web. The companies that exploit this most effectively will be successful and we at 3i look forward to talking with them in the future.

The article was published in MicroScope magazine.

Perspective

Not long ago, you could hardly express yourself on the Web. You lacked the tools to do that. Blogging came along and changed all that. Then you wanted to share your newly discovered web life with your friends. Social networking came along and helped you do that. Once social networking became the norm, you wanted to be able to take advantage of the data that lied in the very social links that formed on the Web. Call it social intelligence, crowd sourcing, whatever. Some social networks opened up and let you build and use applications that used the social connections on top of which they were built to bring you more value. Poking yourself isn’t that much fun, after all.

It’s simply the way we do things in our daily live, only now it’s on the web. We talk to the people around us, now we ca express ourself just as easily on the Web. We know who our friends are and we usually meed friends of friends in real life. We can do the same on the Web. And we go shopping, we plan trips, we go to concerts, we read books. We do all of this socially, with input from our friends in our real life. And now we do the same on the Web.

But what if we could go further? What if we could use the Web in new exciting ways so that we can do things that it’s difficult for us to do in real life? Think about the next possibilities for a moment…

You have a favorite restaurant where you go to all the time. They know what you like and how you like it. But you go on vacation to some distant place. What if the restaurant of the hotel you’re staying at could know what the restaurant back home knows about you? Would they be able to serve you better? Would you have a more pleasant experience there? Probably. Or imagine that you like to order in. You have 2 or 3 dishes you’d like for dinner. But now that you’re on vacation, you can’t find the 3 dishes at a single restaurant. You find them at 3 different ones. What if there could be a delivery service that knew what dishes you liked, and could get them for you, even while you were on vacation?

What’s the next step

These are just simple examples that show one thing: We have the platform to create and deliver new, exciting services, but we lack the data about the users most of the time. That data exists somewhere in most of the cases. The problem is that it’s locked in.

So the next step in social networking, I argue, is letting go of the data. Facebook knows who my friends are (on Facebook) and what I’m doing there. LiveMocha knows who my friends are (on LiveMocha), and what I’m learning there. It would really be useful if these two social networks could communicate. And I’m not just talking about having all my friends in one place, or a single friend social stream, or a single friend request inbox. These are useful features too.

Just to make things clear, I’m not talking about Data Portability here. Data portability is just the first layer. The second layer are the applications that will be created, and the third layer are the social implications of those applications. I know people are working on data portability for quite some time, and we’ll get there soon. What I’m talking about is how we’ll be using that data, once it’s free. Portability is just the beginning of it all.

What I’m talking about is LiveMocha finding out that I’m planning a trip to Iceland this summer. I’m going with some friends on Facebook. Now LiveMocha could offer me an Icelandic 101 language course. It could recommend some people that are Iceland natives. Not just to teach me the language, but to give me some information I might need, or even to hook up while I’m there. At present this is a scenario that simply can’t happen.

Why we should do it

First of all, I believe that the data is ours. Maybe not all of it, but who my friends are, how I’m connected to them and what I’m talking to them about is mine. I should be able to do whatever I want with it.

Secondly, this is probably the most effective way to get new, great services that haven’t been possible before. It may even be the only way. Just look at Facebook Apps. There are thousands of them out there. Facebook alone would have had a really tough time creating all of them. And there are thousands more to come. Only by letting the community contribute can we get new applications that we haven’t seen before.

Thirdly, this can spark competition. A lot. It’s really hard to start a new social application that requires a lot of people to sign up. If they are already on a social network, half the problem is solved. But just think what we could do if we could take the social graphs from several social networks, combine them with some other open services (maps, search, photos, calendars, etc.) and get really cool new services? Without an open infrastructure, it’s really hard for a startup to handle all of these problems. Using networks and platforms that already exist and that are open could help a lot of new startups take off.

Fourthly, technology is getting to a point where it’s becoming transparent. We surf the web to get information, meet people and discuss things. Why should I care if some interesting people are on Facebook and if some great discussion is taking place on Yahoo! Groups? I just want to meet the people and take part in the conversation. The “location” and the technology behind it all should be of no interest to me. Opening the data could make these technologies transparent to us.

These are only a few of the reasons that support opening up the data. I’m sure you can find many others.

What do you think the challenges might be in doing this? And what cool services would you like to see, that aren’t available yet because of this problem?

Let’s face it, nobody posts content to just one site anymore. You probably have a blog, a social network profile, you post videos on YouTube and you keep your pictures organized with Flickr. The people you want to touch, your audience, don’t come to your site anymore. They hang around in communities, so you have to get to them.

That’s why you probably post videos to YouTube, then embed them on your site. You don’t post them on your site or host them there. The simple fact that your videos are on YouTube gives you access to a great publishing platform and to a great potential audience. Here’s the problem we have with this approach.Just because the content is now distributed on a variety of sites, platforms, widgets and so on, that means your attention in handling conversations also has to be distributed.

You just got back from a cool trip and you want to blog about it. You upload the pics to Picasa or Flickr, Post some cool trip videos to YouTube.
Then you embed some of them in a blog post. Now everybody knows about the crazy fun you had on the trip. But if you want to see people’s reactions to your post, to your pics and videos, you have to visit Flickr and YouTube over and over again. Although the pictures, the videos and the blog post are connected by one main meaningful theme, you can’t see them all in one place. And you can’t see the way they are related.

This means that, just to keep track of the conversations you start, your attention is all over the place. That’s not very fun, you waste a lot of time and it’s hard to keep track with what’s being said. We believe that, since you are the creator of your content, you should be able to manage it properly. It’s your digital life, and in a sense, you’re now spending as much time managing it as you spend living it. As more and more ways to create, publish and remix appear, you’ll need a good way to manage all you create more and more.

Welcome to the future, where bits and pieces of your digital self are scattered all over the place. Don’t let them get lost, they are parts of you.