Nathan Weinberg from InsideGoogle wrote an interesting story yesterday about Joga.com, a joint venture between Nike and Google. From the site: "Joga is a place to meet other soccer players, share your own soccer experiences and enjoy photos and videos from around the world."
What caught my eye on Joga was the fact that you can login to the site using your Google Acount although the site is clearly outside the Google network. It doesn't have a Google domain name and it doesn't share the Google look & feel (although the domain name is registered by Google). Does this project herald Google's aspirations to deploy a Single Sign On solution that will enable consumers to log on to internet websites with their Google Accounts?
Google has a history of releasing new features in a way that seems random and undeterministic. Those features tend to bubble up the product development pipeline if they receive a good user acceptance. For example Google Desktop Search started off as a small project by Steve Lawrence, a Google engineer who wanted to be able to easily search his Linux computer. A first beta version was released and now GDS is at its third iteration out of beta.
Don't think of it as a grand Google initiative to take over the web with its user names and passwords. It's more like a couple of soccer loving Googlers working with some sofware engineers at Nike to test a cool new way to mix social networking with Google Video and Google Accounts. This small initiative might evolve into a bigger project comparable to the Liberty Alliance or the Microsoft's .Net Passport - although it will probably come with a creative twist.
