Google “People Like You” Part II

Ok, I'm a lousy capitalist mostly because I'm too lazy. Too lazy to look up to see whether this idea has been patented so I could live the dream of extorting Google for cash someday and too fearful to go look it up on Google and find out that 47,000,000 articles have mentioned this idea already.

I can design a very high level product spec for Google social networking based on actual data very simply. The Google user opts in to a service that tracks searches and once (pick a number 10, 50, 100, whatever) people who have also opted in have done the same search, Google creates an on the fly page for this group of people to communicate with each other and then Google sends an e-mail alert that the group exists. The group grows over time.

This is a very simple product. Google Groups doesn't seem like the right implementation and this is not as robust as what I envisioned here because it lacks information (in that example case that the search had been done from someone browsing on the Nintendo Wii). But it's still kind of a cool product.