Although Kevin Rose erased his tweet, another industry insider has come forward with more information on the rumored Google social networking site, Google Me.
- 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 (GOOG).
- 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.
What is interesting is that Google already has a social networking site called Orkut. (I signed up when it first came out, below is their current look and feel). It does a lot of what Facebook does but it is designed more like early Myspace…meaning it is designed poorly.
The site has seen sporadic updates over the years but it obviously isn’t a high priority. Apparently it is still big in Brazil and India.
If nothing else, perhaps a high-priority social networking site will stem the flow of Google executives to Facebook, including current Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Facebook has recently shown that its social graph may be a way for them to take on Google’s PageRank in making a good search engine. Perhaps Google should be worried.
