Over the weekend, a rumor from a connected source said that Google would be starting up a social network to take on Facebook.
Kevin Rose, Internet personality and Digg social networking founder, tweeted over the weekend that Google has a ‘Facebook killer’ called Google Me in the works.
Rose hasn’t been terribly accurate and might have other fish to fry (Google Buzz competes with Rose’s Digg) but he does have a lot of connections in the Valley.
How would a Google Me work? Google already has about 30 different social properties that it has built or acquired — including Orkut, a social network popular in Brazil.
- Buzz is Google’s Twitter-like real time updater.
- Orkut is a full social networking site with poor design and a small following outside of Brazil
- YouTube has millions of users with friends and videos
- Picasa let’s people share pictures with others (Facebook’s original purpose)
- Blogger is a web CMS and Reader can give you a feed of your favorite posts
- Apps engine lets developerrs build web-based applications for Google users
- Google Docs share documents with other Gmail users (vs. Facebook Docs)
- Google Friend Connect allows you to share sites with other users
- Google Latitude is a geo-targeted friending app
- Google Dashboard manages all of these services and others
It is all already there. Everything Facebook does, Google (GOOG) already does.
Frankly, it would be more surprising if Google didn’t soon create a common platform for all of these social networks. The only thing Google doesn’t have is organization between its groups to give this one consistrant look and feel.
