Ben's Blog World: Buzz was just for starters -- here comes Google Me (look out Facebook, lock up your daughters, etc.)

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Buzz was just for starters -- here comes Google Me (look out Facebook, lock up your daughters, etc.)

Filed under: Internet, Google, Social Software

If you follow the rumor mill, you probably heard about Google Me a few days ago. Digg's founder Kevin Rose tweeted about it a couple of days ago. It's not that people didn't believe him, but it just seemed a bit random to come from someone like him. Now, thanks to the added confirmation of early Facebooker and Quora cofounder Adam D'Angelo, it seems like Google Me is all but confirmed.

It's just a series of bullet points, which Adam D'Angelo says he's 'pieced together from reliable sources'. Still, they make for fantastic reading: [the following is copied and pasted!]

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.

You can certainly see Google's point of view. With Facebook's 'social graph search' and continuous meteoric growth, Google is likely experiencing 'fear' and 'worry' for the first time in its corporate life. Google has never been sharp on social aspects of the Web, so I'm curious as to whether Google Me will be a Facebook clone, or something altogether more adventurous.

Does anyone else think that Google looks more and more like a lumbering giant that simply throws fistfuls of resources and money at its problems? A bit like Microsoft...?

(And what on earth happened to the Google-owned Orkut...?!)

[via Inside Facebook]