Ramit Sethi says on I Will Teach You To Be Rich: Set smaller goals: impress friends, get girls, lose weight. This  basically means, take incremental steps towards attaining a goal. I guess you could also call it Iterative Development since it relates to the world of software/webware development, but since I read that article on IWTYTBR just before setting off on a search to figure out why Jaiku wasn’t letting me import/add feeds, I felt it was one of those The Secret moments where something happens for a reason.

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In looking through comments on the Jaiku support channelt, I found this post from Jyri Engstrom where he mentions other posts including this one about Google addition of default Contact Groups, and this one from the Google Reader blog about using groups to manage your shared items.

And just now Google is letting you share updated contact information with the groups you’ve created in addition to those shared items. Does anyone else see a social network slowly emerging from the Magic Eye Puzzle? Of course you do – I know I’m not the only one.

Of course, the most interesting part will be to see what the actual unification strategy will be – or if there will be one at all. What I mean is: Will there be a defined “home page” / “starting point” for the Google social network like there is for MySpace and Facebook? Or will they just make your friends activities accessible wherever you use whatever Google Apps you use? If I’m in my Gmail, will my friends activities show up there? If I use iGoogle as my home page, will the activity stream be there? What if I only use Google Reader? (Not a truly likely scenario, since I think anyone using Reader would also be using Gmail) Will I get more than just my friends’ Shared Items?

In a similar vein, it looks like Yahoo is starting to some slow churn development on their social network as well, and they may also be pursuing the distributed activity stream home page idea, since you can now import your activity into your Yahoo Profile, but if you’re a member of MyBlogLog, you can do it there as well. The thing is, the two of those are separate (even though it seems like they could sync the settings fairly easily), which means you’ll have a harder time managing those activity streams that you will if the Google activity is all managed from one place and pushed from there.