On June 26th I reported that Google Me, a new social network from Google was in the works. During that announcement I quoted Digg founder Kevin Rose who leaked the announcement, today we have further confirmation of the Google Me program.
The full-fledged competitor has been outed further by former Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo who said during a Quora Q&A session that Google Me is very real:
“This is not a rumor. This is a real project. There are a large number of people working on it. I am completely confident about this.
They realized that Buzz wasn’t enough and that they need to build out a full, first-class social network. They are modeling it off of Facebook.
Unlike previous attempts (before Buzz at least), this is a high-priority project within Google.
They had assumed that Facebook’s growth would slow as it grew, and that Facebook wouldn’t be able to have too much leverage over them, but then it just didn’t stop, and now they are really scared.”
Google hasn’t been all that successful in the social networking market as of late, with Orkut popular only in select countries and pretty much all of South America and Buzz failing to gain Twitter type traction after launching with privacy issues at the forefront of the system. However it’s not to say that Google doesn’t have the tools necessary to build a popular social system. In fact Google Open Graph technology has been around for a much longer period than Facebook’s own recently announced system and Google has a large enough infrastructure to build out any type of system they can dream up.
It’s interesting to think that Google would be copying Facebook, after all isn’t Facebook largely a copy of various technologies that have been around for long periods of time. From Twitter to Google Bookmarks, Facebook isn’t something new, it’s just something that’s been better put together than its competitors.
In any case, the fact that Google is putting a ton of workers behind Google Me is a good sign. It might not be Facebook, but alternatives can only work to strengthen the market over time. However if Google fails to gain against Facebook it may be a long time before any real viable type of system is created.
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