I was browsing the interwebs a few hours ago and thought I’d pop over to Google Plus. While there, I did my bit of +1ing stuff that I found interesting, commented on +Richard Fergie’s post and called Kevin Gibbons a legend (as you do) on a Google plus post

Anyway, I digress…

I was going through Kevin’s Google plus profile page and found something I’d never seen before!

If you’re one of those who know everything about SEO/SEM/Social Media/Content Marketing/Inbounding then this might not be new (based on this thread, it looks like this was a feature released early this month) But I was like WTF! So I checked out Daniel Bianchini’s Google plus profile and saw the same thing!

The first thing that cropped into my head was, “is Google crowd-sourcing  information about people?” You know like how anchor-text was introduced by Lawrence Page in his paper as a method of understanding relevance about documents (web pages) by the words used by those that cite them. Is this the anchor-text equivalent on people?

I have a few nicknames. My mother affectionately calls me Shahad, my brother refers to me as Shaadee, my best friends Shalini and Imran refer to me as Shaadie (which incidentally means ‘marriage’ in Hindi). So I thought this is a pretty clever way of Google trying to understand relationships.

So I tried actually filling this stuff. When you click on the link you are prompted to the following form:

You can click on “show all fields” you’re prompted to this more detailed form:

So I went ahead and began filling em:

And clicked save – this is what you get:

So according to Google plus, this is visible only to me. Also it looks like this syncs with my Gmail contact details. When I search for Dan in my Gmail, these exact descriptions are brought up there too.

So what’s Google trying to do here?

Obviously Google can’t share these personal information with anyone else, so my best guess is that Google’s trying to take personalisation to the next level. I was listening to Amit Singhal at Google who, when describing the future of search mentioned how Google’s goal was to be a trusted and reliable personal assistant. He touched upon the fact that mobile is one of the most personal of objects that anyone owns. So could it be that with the advent of smartphones and the revival of email, that Google will actually be able to gather information from people and figure out how they relate to each other at a personal level?

Will I be able to use Google voice search and say “call Dan1″ and Google will ring him for me? Or say “text my boss” and Google will send Dan a text message? Hmm.. I don’t know. But if I was a gambling person I’d put all my money on this being another step for Google in their quest to become a fully blown answer engine.

I’d obviously love to hear your thoughts What do you think is Google actually up to?