An interview with Google's Joe Kraus on How to Make the Web More Social

[mayurpathak]

No, I have not taken this interview. Neither do Joe Kraus knows me personally. (but ah!, I would like to know him though.) I was just plain impressed by the way he gave an interview to Wharton. It pulled me to post it here. May be this is useful for CEans.

If Wharton has an objection, they can very well rebuff me. I will remove it. But dont tell them Please feel free to contact. So here it is...
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Werbach: Hi, this is Kevin Werbach, professor at the Wharton school and organizer of the Supernova Conference. I'm speaking today with Joe Kraus, director of product management at Google and truth be told, a former high school mate of mine many years ago. So, good to talk to you Joe.
Kraus: Good talking to you. That was too long ago.
Werbach: It's kind of scary, isn't it?
Kraus: Yeah.
Werbach: So, you've done some interesting things with your career. You're one of the founders of Excite, the early web portal, and then started a company called Jot that was doing wikis and collaboration software, which got bought by Google. And then, to those of us on the outside, it seemed like you kind of disappeared into Google for a while and now you've come back out. So, tell us what you've been working on.
Kraus: For the last year I've been working Google's social initiatives, which are really kind of in a couple of main buckets. But, probably the largest one is the notion of, "How do you make the whole web social?"

So, the killer apps that have really worked on the web have always been about connecting people to one another. So, whether it is instant messaging and e-mail as communications to connect people to one another, whether it's photo-sharing as a way to connect people to one another through photos, or blogging as a way to connect people to one another through the words, people have always been social and the killer apps that have really succeeded on the web have always been social.

And really, the primary set of initiatives at Google that I work on are, "How do you make the whole web a more social place?" A lot of that is divided into a couple of buckets. One is this thing called OpenSocial, which we can talk more about. And another is a product which we've recently launched called Friend Connect. But, that's just the general rubric of how do you make the web a more social place.
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You can read the rest on the Wharton website by clicking here.