Google: First It Was About Search, Now It's About....Football?
- By: kidmercury [privmsg - website] On 18th Mar 2006 In
After you develop strengths in search, advertising, and P2P commerce, what's the next logical step? Why football, of course! (Football meaning what Americans call soccer but the rest of the world calls football). Google has apparently partnered with Nike to create the site Joga.com. From Joga's about page:
Joga is an online community created by Google and Nike for anyone anywhere in the world who shares a love for soccer, the world's most popular sport. Joga is about getting to know your fellow fans; creating games and clubs; accessing athletes from Nike; and enjoying video clips and photos (you can even upload your own). You can strengthen existing friendships and begin new ones, join a wide variety of professional athletes and soccer communities, and even create your own to discuss soccer, exchange tips on the coolest moves, browse through various pitches worldwide, and plan your next game.
This may be Google's attempt at addressing its one big weakness: online communities.
This seems fake, but apparently it's real; Phillip Lenssen notes that Google owns the domain name Joga.com, and that the iframe used on the site's homepage resides on Google.com.
via Vrypan
Don't Get It
That doesn't make any damn sense at all. Methinkgs somebody got carreid away with their 20% time. How does this help to organize the world's information exactly?
MySpace Foosball
It is their way of fighting off MySpace...they want to make it easy to create free targeted communities. Since MySpace has already hit the music and arts side pretty hard, Google wants to attack it from another angle: sports.
Soccer is the most popular sport, and most Orkut users are located in Brazil (a huge soccer country), so perhaps this ties those together and aims to help create micro communities starting from a huge even (World Cup) which is sure to have more then enough fanfare to go viral.
According to this site you can create your own communities and even add blogs and videos and whatnot to them (which will likely have free hosting of course). I think this is a cheap way to market Orkut and a cheap way to make sure new features get noticed.
How much easier is it for Google to determine market trends and stop spam if they become the default storage platform and one of the default publishing platforms for nearly every type of information?
Japanese call Football
Japanese call Football Soccer too, so that's about 400 million of the world's residents referring to the game as Soccer.
And most other countries refer to it as Futbol, not Football.
Especially since the world has adapted from sloppy power oriented English Football to the Latino finesse of Futbol.
Which leaves the only countries still calling the game Football being those of the Queen's Common Wealth, and Zimbabwe.
Rand says "How does this
Rand says "How does this help to organize the world's information exactly?"
By selling shoes, how else? :)
By selling shoes, how else?
I wonder if they will set up Google ShoeCams (BETA) in the sweatshops so you can see your shoes being made?
Replace the $100 Laptop
Replace the $100 Laptop Sweatshop Blogger initiative with Google ShoeCams?
By George, what Genius.
http://www.fff.fr/
Lorenbaker...not so & lots more.
Especially since the world
Sorry Loren but football originated in sloppy power oriented England and Football is the official international name. The Queens commonwealth is also hardly a small bunch of insignificant countries. The commonwealth includes amongst several others India so there's a billion or so that call the game football.
Phil, just stirring up the
Phil, just stirring up the cup a little, no offense intended. I'll keep my making fun of Team England and Beckham sucks comments off Threadwatch and save them for the local pub :)
By the way, Joga.com is not the first Nike/Google sports product marketing site as Nike uses Google Maps to power http://www.runlondon.com 's RouteFinder.
Viva India!
No offence taken :) by all
No offence taken :)
by all means say what you want about Beckham. I'll probably be joining you after he screws up (misses a penalty or gets red carded) and gets us kicked out of the world cup.
An old viking sport
It's something about a ball that's played using your foot right? football equals futbol equals fussball, and a few more, including fótbolti, fodbold ...
I never did understand that game mysef, but my ancestors who invented it played it with the heads of slayed enemies (yes, notably Englishmen), and that at least adds a bit of twisted humor to it...
Nowadays it's just dull - at most two-three goals in what, forty minutes or so.. that's not even a game, it's just ballet for guys...drunk guys that is. I suppose you have to be drunk to like it.
(*ducks*)
:-)