By Tomio Geron

Google funded a group of graduate students to develop a prototype of a next-generation social network that could boost its position in the sector beyond its also-ran Orkut service.

The “Socialstream” prototype, developed over eight months by six students at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human Computer Interaction Institute last year, is billed as a “unified social network.” The aggregator service would interact with and draw from existing social networks.

Socialstream was not a Google-designed project. Rather, Google sponsored a master's project focusing on social networking to see if outside ideas could add to what the company is already doing, said Bonnie John, professor and director of the the HCI master's program. "Google said, 'Reinvent social networking.' That was their charge," Ms. John said. "The project was very open."

Students started from scratch and did extensive user testing to come up with an the eventual ideal model of social networking—a kind of open source social network.

“A service model allows many social networks to be linked together, letting them share both content and the nature of the relationships of the people who use them," the Socialstream web site reads.

The move to “reinvent and rethink” social networking fits with Google’s previous efforts in e-mail, online documents, and search, which have been markedly different from competitors.

Socialstream features include aggregation of information from across different social networks, the ability to know when updates are made to contacts on those networks, a visual timeline of contact updates, a GoogleTalk-like sidebar, and different levels of sharing.

People could keep track of posts item such as trackbacks and favorite posts of their friends. It could also become possible to post items to Socialstream or to any particular social network.

It is unclear how a Google-backed social network aggregator would grab content from other social networks. Ms. John said the project did not consider that business issue. "Most companies say, 'You come up with the idea and we'll solve the business problems,'" Ms. John said. In theory this could steal page views from other social-networking sites, such as MySpace, and Facebook.

“All participating sites would simply share information through it,” the Socialstream web site reads. “While the centralization of social information would enhance all applications that use it, the [unified social network’s] own interface would be very simple, perhaps only focusing on preferences and privacy controls that applied everywhere.”

Google is sponsoring another Carnegie Mellon student project this year, on group scheduling, Ms. John added.

The idea of an aggregated social network is a solution to the problem of avid web users who have signed up for a variety of social-networking sites—from MySpace and Facebook to LinkedIn and Flickr—and cannot keep track of them all.

Startups such as BlueSwarm, in private beta, and Wink have some features to aggregate social networks. Also, Mozilla is developing a social-networking browser that compiles different social networks. Its screenshots look remarkably similar to Socialstream.

Google’s lone current social network offering, Orkut, is not ranked in the top ten by Hitwise for U.S. social-networking sites, which means Orkut has less than one percent market share. It has gained some popularity in Brazil and India.

Socialstream was a master’s degree project at Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute and it is unclear when or if Google would launch such a product. Ms. John does not know whether Google has bought or licensed social stream. However, one of the students on the project, J. Nicholas Jitkoff has been hired at Google, she said.

Socialstream does give a sense of Google’s strategy in social networking: rather than build a product to compete with the dominant players—MySpace and Facebook—it appears ready to create a meta-social network to reshape the industry by providing a badly needed tool for which the proliferation of social networks has created a need.

Yahoo has also been attempting to boost its social-networking stance. While it has popular photo-sharing site Flickr, it has been repeatedly rumored that Yahoo could be interested in acquiring Facebook, and more recently Bebo. Yahoo is also now rumored to be developing a new social-networking service to replace its Yahoo 360, which hasn’t had success.

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