Right now, Google Me is effectively a mythical service. Just 14 words in a tweet from Digg founder, Kevin Rose, kicked off thousands speculating about a Facebook-fighting social network from the search giant. Meanwhile Facebook has hit 500m users and Mark Zuckerberg is confidently predicting that number will reach 1 billion. So why would Google even bother to try and battle Facebook and why would anyone predict that it could win?
Google actually got into the social networking game marginally earlier than Facebook. Though it launched in January 2004, several weeks before Facebook got its public debut, with a name that sounds less like a website than an obscure character in Pingu, Orkut has struggled. However, it’s still managed to rack up 100m active users and is seriously popular in places like Brazil, India and Russia.
Google’s more recent experiments with social networking haven’t been tremendously successful. The Google Buzz privacy problems meant that service started badly and has never really recovered, languishing as an echo chamber for tweets and RSS feeds. Meanwhile Google Wave made a big splash when it launched but its complexity left all but the most hardcore Google fans confused.
So why the hell do I think that Google Me could really challenge Facebook? Because this time, I think Google will take the challenge more seriously. By spreading features like the Facebook Like button out across the web, Facebook has been gunning directly for Google. It wants to pull the web within the walls of Facebook and better Google’s grasp of what users want by harvesting all that information. Google needs to fight back.
While the Google Me talk is slotted firmly in the category marked “rumour” right now, Techcrunch points to a comments from Adam D’Angelo, Facebook’s former chief technology officer, that say Rose was right on the money: “This is not a rumour. This is a real project. There are a large number of people working on it. I am completely confident about this.”
That confidence is supported by internal moves at Google where Rick Klau, the brains behind Buzz, has been shifted to head up Google Profiles – the ideal product to be retooled to create user profiles for Google Me.
D’Angelo says Google knows Buzz was a flop and is now building: “a full, first-class social network…modelling it off of Facebook.” And there are weapons in Google’s arsenal that Facebook has yet to match. ??Imagine a blend of YouTube, Google Maps, Picassa, Latitude, Google Talk, Google Voice and Gmail coupled with the status updates of Google Buzz and the collaborative potential of Google Wave. Then sling it at all those Android phones. That’s what Google Me could be.
Creating a truly powerful mobile social network could allow Google Me to outflank Facebook. With Android, Google has built up a complex picture of how people use their phones to connect with social networks and should have learned valuable lessons from the Google Buzz privacy snafu to swerve issues like the perennial Facebook privacy concerns.
If Google can create a service with Google Me that allows users to better control all the information about them online, they could start to chip away at Facebook’s seemingly unassailable lead. Remember when MySpace was the once and future king of social media? Facebook’s grip on the throne may seem unbreakable but an all out assault by Google could still chip away at its numbers.
Whatever happens, Google needs to do something to counter the threat from its rival – a Facebook Gmail competitor is still being whispered about and the man behind the Chrome OS (Matthew Papakipos) has jumped ship to join Zuckerberg’s crew.
If Google Me does set out to fight Facebook it’ll be a long and bloody war but I wouldn’t bet against Google finally creating a social network up to the job. If I knew exactly what that needed to look like though, I’d be on a plane to Mountain View now.
Let me know: am I utterly wrong? Does Facebook now have an unassailable lead? Or could Google Me really turn the tide?
