Have you seen Joga? It's a community site for soccer players... which is in an of itself no
big deal.

http://www.joga.com

But the partnership between Nike and Google that gave birth to Joga is interesting.

First of all, this is to the best of my knowledge the first time that Google has taken the role of content creator (rather than tools creator). And perhaps most strangly, you need to use your google ID to log into Joga.

This i just find wierd. It's like the NY Times asking you for your bank PIN# to read the paper on line. As a Google user who uses AdWords, adSense, GoogleVideo, all sites that include payments, banking info, and transactions - i'm just plain wierded out by them using that same ID to centralize my ID as it relates to content and search.

And more importantly, it's confusing.

"Welcome to Joga.com, an online personal networking service, operated by Google Inc."

I guess you could argue that Google was in the content space before with services like Orkut -but they were services not content front ends. BTW - Joga has JogaTV as well - on the home page.

Overall the thing that has me scratching my head is the front and center Google branding (both interms of log in and logo) on the home page. I'm not sure what that says about Google's long term plans as it related to content companies. But take a look at the site and see if it doesn't make you scratch your head.