It seems that social software (broadly defined) may become the scene of the long-awaited battle between Google and other major players such as Microsoft and Yahoo. Google, with its new design and personal search service has announced it will attack one of Microsoft's and Yahoo's principal lock-in services: personal webmail with an offer of 1Gb of storage space and the application of a search/find approach to archiving mail rather than manual deletion and filing. Meanwhile, as Google moves from search to mail and thinks about how to integrate Orkut - its entry in the social networking space - Microsoft plans to fight Google's dominance in search and also muscle in on the social networking space, with Wallop and other potential products of their social computing research group. The company recently invited opinion formers in this area to a social software summit (see David Weinberger's coverage) to help drive this forward, and influential blogger and MS insider Robert Scoble has called for a new approach to search using weblog aggregation.

Clearly, some form of personal search combined with aggregation based on content sources from individual networks is an obvious next step for search engines. If Google were to integrate personal search, personal social networking (Orkut) and personal webmail (Gmail) at some point then they would have a seriously powerful offering, but what about the privacy and trust issues this would pose? Orkut's terms of service are bad enough already. If Gmail and other services follow this model then no amount of puff PR about clever Stanford graduates is going to disguise the fact that Google will have become a major potential threat to individual privacy. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. No business of Google's size is immune to this rule.

Fiona Romeo makes a good point that social software should avoid asking children for more personal profile information than strictly necessary because they are often too ready to share it without considering the wider implications of doing so. I hope somebody somewhere is looking out for adults as well....