Now that Google is increasingly owning everything online, they ought to start thinking about integrating their Google Analytics service into everything else they own not called AdWords.
In addition to analytics, the Google accounts and services I use include Webmaster Tools, Local Business Center, iGoogle, Alerts, Gmail, Talk, Docs, Notebook, Calendar, Maps, Maps for Mobile, Earth, Picasa, Groups, Page Creator, Reader, Bookmarks, Shared Stuff, Blogger, FeedBurner, AdWords, AdSense, Checkout, Jaiku, Dodgeball, Orkut, Video, YouTube, Desktop, Mobile Search, GOOG-411, Google SMS, Web History, Trends, Suggest, Sets, and Toolbar.
I’d like to get statistics for all of these products and services to analyze how and how often I use them. I admit, it would be a huge step for a lot of people to surrender and personally identify all that data about themselves and entrust it to a megacorporation.
Services such as Tumblr and the
most recent Google acquisition, Jaiku, allow account holders to plug in
the RSS feeds from all of their various online accounts, from your blog
to YouTube to digg to Flickr and Twitter and display the content you create in one "lifestream" to which friends (or strangers) can subscribe. The emergence of the notion of, and services catering to, lifestreaming suggest that the idea of sharing your entire electronic life is gaining a foothold in the popular consciousness.
Certainly, user statistics for all these services are being collected by the service itself, though that data is not necessarily personally identifiable. Why not allow people or organizations access to their own data?
The payoff could be huge for both the user and the organization. Say Google runs with my request and integrates Analytics into all of their products and opens up the user data to their users. The analytics of how you behave online could prove invaluable to those users in terms of finding ways to use their time or services more efficiently or in hundreds of other ways we have yet to fathom.
The payoff for Google is massive and obvious in that they would accrue a gold mine of user behavior data, the knowledge from which they could then apply to their existing and future products.
Further, with Google’s foray into the productivity software business, the resultant integrated system could form the foundation for a largely automated time recording system to calculate time sheets in the background, saving businesses a lot of lost time and productivity.
And that could the mother of all cash cows.
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