"A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-natured inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with same our own opinion from another."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance
Emerson's Self Reliance is one of my favorite pieces of literature, and I couldn't help but think of this passage as I read today's Wall Street Journal
article about a rumored upcoming feature change in Gmail. Apparently Google is adding a new module that allows users to share status updates, as well as content across Google products, including YouTube and Picasa.
If you ask me, this is long overdue. Since back in 2005 when a friend at Google struggled to make Orkut a player in social networking outside of India and Brazil, I've argued that Google should use Gmail as a trojan horse for social networking. What's always made more sense to me is for Google to grow social networking through the Gmail platform. Why? Because email is sticky (people don't like to change their email address), people spend all day online and logged into their email accounts, and the primary social activity on the web is email.
That last point no longer holders. Back then we didn't have Facebook with its super dynamic content. But in my opinion the biggest reason why Facebook overtook MySpace overtook Friendster is because the sites were increasingly dynamic. We had a reason to go back -- there was a major evolution in dynamism from Friendster's testimonials to MySpace's comments to Facebook's newsfeed.
I'm happy to see Google finally gets it, although by now the Facebook train has left the station. And of course, this is a lesson for all of us to heed the wise words of a literary great.
