Egon: “There’s something very important I forgot to tell you.”<\/p>\n
Venkman: “What?”<\/p>\n
Egon: “Don’t cross the streams.”<\/p>\n
Venkman: “Why?”<\/p>\n
Egon: “It would be bad.”<\/i><\/p>\n
According to a leaked video from an internal Google briefing — first reported by a commenter called “fanboy”<\/a> at Google Blogoscoped and expanded on by Ionut Alex. Chitu<\/a> at Google Operating System — the company plans to tie together some of the strands of social information it has through Google Reader and other services into what it apparently refers to as “activity streams.” <\/p>\n The idea seems to be that your RSS feeds and your Calendar events and GTalk updates and your blog postings could all be turned into a single stream of information, which others could subscribe to. As more than one person<\/a> has mentioned, this sounds very much like a Facebook feed, which contains everything from status updates to photos that have been posted.<\/p>\n There aren’t a whole lot of details on these new plans — which go by the code name Maka or Mocha<\/a> or possibly Makamaka<\/a>, depending on who you believe — but I think such a feature is a smart move for Google to make. <\/p>\n It’s ironic that Facebook’s unified feed, which caused so much consternation when it was first released, is a huge part of what makes the site so sticky — being able to see what all of your contacts are up to in a single glance is very addictive. Google has a bunch of useful apps like Gmail and Reader and so on, but they aren’t tied together very well. Mocha could change that.<\/p>\n Note:<\/strong> There are also some pretty amazing stats about Google Reader in the video briefing, including the fact that<\/a> the back-end for the Reader (which apparently serves as the back-end for other Google apps that involve feeds) has 10 terabytes of data and 8 million feeds, and that Google plans to add feed recommendations and other social features soon.<\/p>\n Further reading:<\/b><\/p>\n MG Siegler at ParisLemon says Google appears to be moving in the direction he has been hoping<\/a> it would for some time now, and Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has some thoughts<\/a> on the various features Google seems to be looking at — including possibly allowing comments on Google Reader shared items, which is a bit of a sticky subject as this TechCrunch post<\/a> outlines.<\/p>\n Update:<\/b><\/p>\n Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped says in a comment here that he has reason to believe the proper name for Google Reader’s new project is “Maka-Maka.” Not sure what the name is supposed to mean — all I could find out from a Google search was that Maka-Maka is the name of a popular “manga” (or adult) comic involving two female friends who become lovers<\/a>, and that the word “maka” in Hawaiian means “eye.”<\/p>\n