You can find Part I, Part II, and Part III of the series below. They cover Google’s record of pushing for open access to all broadcast content — including Google’s own web applications, as well as web-based magazines, blogs, and especially video content currently associated more with television — and their role in mediating that content and generating advertising revenue in the process. I also alluded to a vision of Google’s ideal world, in which all information moved freely from device to device (or more accurately, any information on the Internet would be available from any type of device).

Essentially, Google wants to make accessing information easier by organising it for you in different ways for different situations. An important part of that is the Google Account. With one account, linked to a single Email address, Google lets you navigate all its applications easily. Once you’re signed in, Google’s different tools recognise you automatically. If you have a Gmail account, try this (and if you don’t have a Gmail account, please consider relocating to the 21st century): log into your Email, and click the “Calendar” tab at the top left. A daybook, with entries viewable by day, week, or month opens. Now, without logging out, go to google.com. You’ll notice your Email is listed in the top right corner. Try clicking the maps application — if you have set your default address, for example your home address, every time you open the maps application, it will open displaying your home. If you enter an item into your calender, with a date, time, and location, and set a reminder, Google will send you an Email to remind you about the event, and link directly to a map that can provide directions from your default location. The Google Account transfers whatever information would help enhance the functionality of each tool from application to application — automatically.

Because this information is all stored on the web, not on your computer, if you go to a friend’s house and log into your Google account on their Mac, your settings will be retained. Likewise, if you access your Gmail, Google Maps, or Google Chat on your iPhone (ahem), you’ll pull up the same account you see on your home PC. What all this means, from a user perspective, is that all these applications are very intuitive and easy to navigate and use.

Unbeknownst to most North Americans, Google offers a social networking application, and one that you can access instantly if you already have a Google Account, and which helps tie all of the above together. Orkut is pretty much unused in North America, but it has millions of users in India, and over half of all Orkut users are based in Brazil (by comparison, only .38% of all Orkut users are Canadian — whereas Canada has been among the fastest adopters of Facebook). This is unfortunate for Google, which needs a centralised social networking system in place to implement many of its future plans.

What plans? Plans like easier transference of information between different applications and users. Sure, you can Email all your friends every time you have an opinion about a new album or movie, but wouldn’t it be easier if they could just visit your social networking profile page and read about it for themselves? This may not sound like such an important function, but if the predictions of Long Tail theory bear out, intelligent recommendation-based filtering systems will play a crucial role in the way we collect and process information as individuals, as well as how information is processed and distributed systematically by an entity like Google, or Facebook, or Netflix, or Amazon, or any other company that makes its bread and butter by connecting people to the content they need, especially the content they need without knowing they need it.

I made a prediction not long ago that within a year, Google would attempt to buy out Facebook. I see now that I was naïve. Sure, I knew that Google and Facebook had their differences, and Facebook was cozy with Google nemesis Microsoft, and anyway, Facebook isn’t even a publicly traded company … but I figured owning a site like Facebook (as opposed to Orkut, mirroring the YouTube v. Google Video dilemma) was so important to Google’s plans, and Google was so wealthy, that surely they’d make Mark Zuckerberg an offer he couldn’t refuse.*  Well, I still think it’s true that Google will do everything within its power to centralise social networking information the same way it has drawn Email, calender, maps, and so forth under the Google Accounts umbrella … but it won’t be by a move as drastic or clumsy as simply taking over Facebook. Google didn’t get to where they are today by predicating all their plans on contingencies entirely out of their control.

On the contrary — Google’s plan is not to bring Facebook into the Google fold, but to bring Google’s connectivity to Facebook. Late last year, they announced plans for a platform which would allow application developers to create tools which would function across different social networking systems, from Orkut to Facebook to MySpace. Named OpenSocial, this platform is a series of application programming interfaces, which basically means a set of protocols that allow any developer creating tools for these various systems to make them inter-functional. Probably the most obvious example of how this will work is YouTube; video windows from the YouTube system can be easily embedded into things like your Facebook homepage, your favourite Internet message board, or even your blog. It’s so easy even I can do it.

In this way, media and applications can transfer content from system to system, as opposed to keeping each application confined to the closed system of a single social network. OpenSocial was a bit of a flop, but Google is hoping to breathe new life into the plan with recently-launched Google Friend Connect, which allows users of different websites to share things like product recommendations, music reviews, and all those other things social advertisers are slavering to get us involved in.

Not everything is going according to Google’s plan. Last year, they lost the bidding war for Facebook’s ad placement to Microsoft; now, a wrench has been thrown into Google’s plan to bring Friend Connect to Facebook. While MySpace jumped on board, Facebook has declined the offer, citing privacy concerns (to their credit — or not — Facebook, for the most part, jealously guards user info). Yesterday, Facebook announced their decision to reject Friend Connect, rather than allow Google to decide how Facebook’s user information is used. Is this a legitimate concern, or just an attempt to stymie Google’s efforts to bring all social networking, whatever the website, into its open-but-Google-operated web of interconnectivity? That last link credits Rachel Happe, a research manager at IDC, as “saying the dispute is ultimately about control rather than privacy.” Which is to say, Facebook doesn’t really object to the invasion of privacy — they object to surrendering control of user information. It’s about exerting power over this information, not some concern for the well-being of their members.

Time will tell if this can be resolved, and if Google’s efforts to make inroads towards aggregating social networking applications into an inter-connected and inter-functional web will pay off. If they do, Google will emerge as the leader in organising, mediating and distributing content in virtually all areas of Internet culture, be it blogging about cats, or writing book reviews on Amazon, or forwarding videos to friends on Facebook, or shopping for a new kickplate, or chatting with friends, or looking up recipes for macaroni, or locating yourself on a map with your wireless device, or even watching downloaded movies on your TV. A single Google Account will allow you to access all this content quickly and easily, seamlessly identifying you to whatever applications you encounter along the way.

Arguably, it will be necessary to collect data on your shopping and surfing and reading and viewing habits, and to synthesize it all into a capsule that identifies your preferences in a nutshell. The reasons for this will become clearer as the mountains of cross-referenceable material on your tastes becomes more and more useful in streamlining and enhancing the experience of doing all the things we’ll do online.