Integrated Google

After playing around a bit with some of Google's services it would be nice if things are more integrated rather than looking like a hodge podge of different websites. Single Sign-on and Profile I think number one thing they need to do is to get single sign on (SSO) working. SSO is different from just having a common user ID and password like Google accounts, though that is a requirement. Google should just have one sign in page that would allow you to go to any of Google's services without having to log in again. Right now Orkut requires a separate sign-in in order to access it. Along with the single sign-on Google should get rid of each application having their own profile and unify it into one single place. Although provide the facility to use different profiles with whatever service. Somewhat like Yahoo, but hopefully done properly. Drive space Next is the unification of all our space. I think this only applies to PicasaWeb, Blogger, YouTube/GoogleVideo, Google Documents and GMail. But I think it would be a good idea to just merge the space you would normally get with GMail into one pool rather than having a separate area for it. All our pictures including profile ones should be moved to PicasaWeb's space as well. Contact management Another one would be contact management. Right now we have GMail's address book, which by far is the simplest of any service I have used, but it does not provide good ways of managing your contacts. I think they should leverage Orkut and move all the contact information into Orkut (with privacy settings of course, you don't want to give out information about a friend that they don't want people to know about). We should also allow other people to see what we write about them in the contact info (in case we want to make sure we have everything up to date) within limits we set. How would they do it? Of course this sort of endeavor would be a lot of work. If I were in their shoes I would try to leverage a lot of the projects and specifications that are out there now. For example, single sign-on could be done through JEE's architecture already. The authentication token can be passed down to existing apps without having to recode them in Java. The Google Account can then be converted to use the OpenID specification as well. All our profile information can be stored in LDAP servers. Profile pictures would be rendered pointers to PicasaWeb's area so it would be more efficient on the LDAP servers. If all the space is pooled into GMail, then they only have to manage one data store rather than multiple. And since it is all pooled, we may end up with 4Gmail rather than the current 2G.