The linked page is part of the Google Social Search feature. It was launched in 2009. Information on the feature is available here: http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer...

This is not new. This has been there for quite sometime.

Nearly 2 years or more.

I admire Google for making information like this public.

I see "connections of connections" and I'm wondering if they somehow consented or approved being shown in results to complete strangers?

All the information is publicly avalible on the internet. They are simply organizing things you could find by other means.

i do not recall making public the list of people with whom i have merely corresponded via gmail, isn't my inbox private?

Your "friends list", sure google crawled that from your inbox, but surely you are aware they have that information and have in essence authorized them with it by using their service to email people.

The "friends of friends" bit is the one that could be creepy potentially, but here as well, all they do is take your friends emails, find other social services on the internet associated with those emails, and display the names of your "friends" (totally public) lists of friends.

This is something you could easily do manually with any search engine.

that's a rough and very large social circle (for me at least). I'd still expect circles or whatever "next-gen" social network to make setting up groups of friends and information control a very easy and pervasive process, enough to make me pry myself away from using email for group communication.

i feel like this wont spawn an equivalent to facebooks "like" button, or twitters "retweet" or "follow me". when i say that im referring to those buttons on third party sites. but then again it might be in googles interest to do so.

i don't get it. what problem does this solve... that i don't know who my friends are?

This page is part of the Google Social Search feature. The purpose of the page is to show the circle of people used in the feature and why you are connected to them.

Its not a bad start..the problem I see UI wise its no very clear how it ties into the information stream produced..ie FB has a news or wall stream..right now GC and your GP stream are separate entities and that might not be the way to go with the UI..

they might be better off combining the GP and GC interfaces together in some significant way...

well if that part was launched in 2009 than the GC of now should have a better more connected UI with the GP product and other google products..

Does anyone else find this creepy?