Last month Google announced the launch of their Real Time Search engine. By including real time search results Google has now officially embraced the updatesphere as a subsphere of “The Web,” as may be seen in the following figures.

Fig. 1: Part of the main index

Fig. 2: Updates as a subcategory of index results

Fig. 3: The updatesphere

In my real time web results Google is indexing updates performed within the three popular micro-blogging platforms: Twitter, FriendFeed and Identi.ca. Notably absent are the status updates from the social networking site Facebook because of its partial walled garden structure. However, it may not be long before these updates will be included as well because Google recently made a deal with Facebook¹. However, it is interesting to note that Google will only receive Facebook updates from public updates on pages (such as fan pages) while competing search engine Bing will receive updates from public profile pages (personal profiles) that are marked as visible for everyone.

Already in 2008 Google started expanding its indexing focus to actions within social networks but the indexed actions were quite messy, for example:

• silvertje has started 0 topics. silvertje has made 1 reply. … silvertje replied on May 13, 2009 06:25 to the question “We want all …”
• Anteek added a contact: Anne Helmond. MyBlogLog Action submitted by Anteek -
• Uploads from Anne Helmond, tagged… – http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvertje/tags/amsterdam/
• Qik | Anne Helmond | Untitled. Streamed by Anne Helmond. More at http://qik.com/silvertje.

These actions performed on social objects² such as Flickr photos, blog posts and videos, seemed to be Google’s first steps into real-time search. By partnering up with Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca and Twitter, Google has now officially welcomed the updatesphere.

Twitters’ status updates have been included in Google’s index for a while but they are now actively promoted on the main site:

Google Social Search and the statussphere

Please note that this screenshot shows the Social Search experiment, part of Google Labs > Experimental Search. It seems that -while writing- Google removed the real-time social results from the main site and moved it to its Labs.

Status updates are moving from the Web sphere to its own distinct sphere: the updatesphere. Google is acting as a demarcating engine in the construction of the updatesphere.³

1. Google its official partners are: “Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.” Google, Relevance meets the real-time web[↩]
2. social because they the objects are part of social web services that allow other people to participate in the objects by tagging, rating, leaving a comment, embedding or favoring for example[↩]
3. For more on web spheres: R. Rogers, The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. (38p) [pre-print pdf][↩]

For some reason this Google Alert struck me as odd. I previously described how Google Alerts showed me that Google is dividing the web into different spheres, for example the websphere, the blogosphere, the newssphere, the ‘commentosphere’ etc. This Alert however, does not so much seem to point to a specific sphere but to a popular practice within spheres: friending, adding, connecting.

Facebook made this practice clearly visible with the introduction of the News Feed that displayed all your actions for all your friends to see. These actions stay within the walled garden of Facebook and are not indexed by Google.

However these actions now seem to be considered valuable by Google as this Alert from Yahoo!s MyBlogLog shows:

This “friending” within social networking sites is one of its main characteristics and is often perceived to be part of a private sphere. In contrast, for many people, Google is a public sphere. Most social networking sites are not being indexed by Google, except for Twitter if you would (convincingly) argue it is a SNS. Fred Stutzman describes the “Message-centricity, as opposed to Profile-centricity” of Twitter as a way to reconceptualize our common perception of social networks. We could add Action-centricity as a way to describe how publicly exposed actions also play an important role in “locating the network around the profile.”

Google now seems to have moved from indexing public profiles and messages to the public actions that occur within these networks. Google is now expanding its original mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” with indexing actions on social networks.

Thanks to Esther Weltevrede for sharing some insightful thoughts on this matter on Skype.