If rumours are to be believed, Google looks set to launch its own social-networking site to rival Facebook, and no, it won’t be anything like Buzz.
What began as a tweet by Digg.com co-founder and CEO Kevin Rose last week has now evolved as ex-Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo talked about it in a Q&A on Quora.com where he says: “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.”
So Rose’s tweet stating “OK, umm, huge rumour: Google to launch Facebook competitor very soon ‘Google Me,’ very credible source,” seems to be based on solid reports of activity within Google.
In fact, this could be mammoth because D’Angelo says it is a “high-priority project” for a “full, first-class social network”.
This may be the case and Google might be a search engine, webmail and online advertising giant, but it is up against big competition. While Bebo and MySpace die a long, slow death, Facebook has more than 400 million active users who collectively spend more than 500 million minutes per month on the site.
And of course it left a bad social media taste in many mouths with Google Buzz. Not to mention the damp squib that was Google Wave. Wait – you don’t remember that?
For perspective on Google Buzz, you might remember when Google CEO Eric Schmidt last year dismissed Twitter as a “poor man’s email system”.
