In the post on mapping the intern, I briefly discussed how having a map of interns across the US would be a cool thing. However, there are obviously some privacy concerns with that. In the comments, Tessa mentions using instant messengers as a conduit for personal info. The appearance of Google Talk completed the connection, and got me thinking.

Google has all the infrastructure to do exactly what I want, and more. Unfortunately, as the Google tools are now, everything is disconnected. It is as if someone needs a meta-20% project to tie all these cool 20% projects together. (Sidebar: Google engineers are given 20% of their time to work on any side project the want. The idea is that some of these ideas will flourish and turn into the next great thing. Orkut started this way.)

The particular Google aspects I’m thinking of are: Google Maps, Google Talk and / or Gmail, and Orkut. (gah, no more links from me. Blogspot’s editor is either horrible with regard to adding links, or it uses some paradigm I’m completely unfamiliar with.–this is somewhat resolved by using WordPress now… but who knows if it’s actually better.) Personal info could be added to any of the three “personal” services (by which I mean workout, small, and googol talk) and shared through some friend-flagging mechanism in Orkut. From there, it’s trivial to build maps on a per-person basis. Google could probably do this now, but it would help to have all their tools tied together (things seem to be going in that direction, with the unified accounts between Gmail and Google talk.)

I consider the above a proof-of-concept for the usefulness of social networks (I’ve been somewhat skeptical about their employ for some time). Are there other similar uses? At some levels, social networks seem a bit like a collaborative filtering approach to finding interesting people, but what do you do from there? Personally, I would find it odd if someone three links detached on Orkut contacted me just to say “hi”, however, there isn’t enough information about me readily available on Orkut to start a more interesting conversation out of the blue.