What is the true measure of your social graph? If you ask Google, the answer is found in your contact database. In further moves designed to create a defacto social network, it was discovered by the source code sleuthings of Ionut Alex Chitu of Google Operating System blog that Google intends to push automatic status updates from those in your chat and contact database listings into your GMail interface.
[img src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_ZaGO7GjCqAI/R3bZpimvd-I/AAAAAAAAHO0/BIN045FzOFw/s640/gmail-code-friend-updates.png" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
Details are still sketchy as to what will appear exactly where in the interface, but Chitu says "they're probably the latest important actions of your contacts from different Google services." Similar functionality, he points out, is also available in Picasa, Orkut and Google Reader.As Matthew Ingram says, "Google is pulling the threads of its social net together," a move that I was told correctly by an insider to Google would happen (although he had told me that it was part of the Maka-Maka/OpenSocial project). It is, in fact, something I had hoped Google would do for quite some time. I don't share the fear that some seem to have - that it'll become an overbearing spammy nuisence. I do, however, see this road to a socially enabled Google suite fraught with pitfalls.
Email is a protocol already gamed heavily, although we call the gaming of email phishing and spamming. By adding layers of complexity to the system, they're also adding in points of vulnerability for folks to turn the normally spam-free environment of GMail into the spam-laden environment of MySpace (want real estate on the screens of thousands of folks, effortlessly? Start uploading images using Picasa to generate unending status updates).