Google To Challenge Facebook Again

Hugh Pickens writes "Google is set to make a fresh attempt to gain a foothold in the booming social networking business, seeking to counter the growing threat that Facebook poses to some of its core services. USA Today reports that the search giant is upgrading Gmail to add social-media tools similar to those found on Facebook, including photo and video sharing within the Gmail application, along with a new tool for status updates. According to reports, Google is planning to give Gmail users a way to aggregate the updates of their various contacts on the service, creating a stream of notifications that would echo the similar real-time streams from Facebook and Twitter. Google's decision to exploit the heavily-used Gmail service as the basis for its latest assault on the social networking business partly reflects the failure of Google's previous stand-alone efforts to enter the social networking sector. Its Orkut networking service, though launched before Facebook, has failed to gain a mass following in most parts of the world, despite success in Brazil, and its acquisition of Twitter rival Jaiku ended in failure after it scrapped development of the service." Update: 02/09 19:32 GMT by KD : It's been announced as Google Buzz; CNET has a detailed writeup.

Comments

privacy is key

[caffeinemessiah]

This might be interesting if they manage to get the privacy thing right. If they don't, I see it as a disaster. I use gmail to communicate with a much wider audience than Facebook. If somehow they managed to let me easily and effectively segment users into different groups, with STRONG WALLS between groups, then it might be interesting.

Although it would take quite a few HCI PhDs to figure out how to do it all without cluttering an already cluttery gmail UI.

Re:privacy is key

[mrboyd]

Relax, I don't know what's going on in your life for your first thing on your mind to be about cheating swinging gay porn and whatnot but most of us just want to avoid their close friends, vague relation and coworker to mix it up too much.

We all have pro-email and personal email but I'd bet that the majority of us had to give out the personal one away in a professional context for whatever reason (file size limit, exchange server bogged down, msn/google chat, etc..) and we really don't need our clients and recruiters to know about the boozing festival we had last week end for our childhood friend's birthday. It's not that we're ashamed of it. It just none of their business.

Your lives belong to us

[gsslay]

I think many people (though probably not enough) already worry about what Google and Facebook separately know and track about their online and private lives. Putting them both together under the control of just one of those companies? No thanks. A million times no.

Google Fail.....

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

Where Google can offer clear cut advantage, it's easy to see them dominating. Online search was ripe for such a revolution. Other things like answers.google.com just didn't make 'em enough money. Social networking needed a revolution and Facebook emerged as the winner. Friendster couldn't do it and MySpace became irrelevent through obsolescence. What I think had made Google such a success has been it's openness towards developers and Facebook beat Google to that game by allowing developers to use it's services (which is torn from Google's own playbook). Google can try but I think they're gonna fail on this one, Facebook people are way too entrenched in it now. I, for one, will avoid Google simple because I just don't like how big they've become.

Less, not more!

[symes]

I really do not want a constant flow of inane jibberings from every person in my gmail contact list day after day. This would drive me totally mad. Presumably there will be an opt out?

No Farmville!

[e2d2]

I will not use this until I can play Farmville on it and send people were-pigs and pork-knights so they can defend themselves properly.

Re:Facebook : 2010 :: CB Radio : 1975

[bberens]

I think you're crazy if you believe that the 13-20 crowd is even vaguely aware of the concept of online security. In my experience they view privacy and security as hurdles, not assets, for the products they use online.