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Can Google Me really beat Facebook? (Christopher Null)

“This is not a rumor.”

One always adores a rumor that begins with such a declaration. And that’s exactly how the buzz begins surrounding Google Me — which, if nothing else, would at least be a curious name for a product considering Apple already has a “Me”-branded service.

Pundits are calling Google Me a potential Facebook killer, perhaps the most likely challenger to the social networking throne since Facebook knocked off MySpace. Insiders state it’s not a question of whether Google Me will launch but when.

Before we get too excited, let’s think about what we know.

The primary source of this information is a now-deleted tweet from Digg boss Kevin Rose, plus additional supporting information from Adam D’Angelo (via TechCrunch), Facebook’s former chief technical officer and founder of the website Quora.

The details are spare. In a brief write-up on his own site, D’Angelo calls Google Me a “high-priority” “real project” with “a massive number of people working on it,” adding that Google “realized that Buzz wasn’t enough and that they need to build out a full, first-class social network” that is modeled off of Facebook. Google really has no choice, states D’Angelo, saying the site is “really scared” about Facebook’s growing influence.

What will Google Me look like? Who can say? Remember, this would be Google’s third foray into social networking. Its first attempt, Orkut (launched before Facebook), was a monstrous disaster in every country other than Brazil and India. Round 2 was the convoluted Google Buzz, launched earlier this year as an attempt to add social networking features to the popular Gmail service. It never took off and its general insanity led one writer to call the system a “complete mess.”

And so we come to Google Me.

Google, with close to half a billion users registered, will have a much higher hill to climb to challenge Facebook than Facebook did with MySpace. MySpace, which at the time was becoming crushed under a deluge of spam, repulsive page designs and a dearth of features, was ripe for taking down.

Facebook, on the other hand, is riding higher every day: Its growth is still accelerating, not slowing, and it’s only occasionally dinged by a mild scandal, usually involving user privacy. So far, a mass revolt does not seem imminent.

In a nutshell, for Google to knock down Facebook, it will need to offer something extremely compelling that we haven’t even dreamed of with Facebook — because you know Facebook will quickly respond in kind.

Unfortunately for Google, that’s not usually how the site works. Google services (Buzz excepted) are often simplified and basic, designed to appeal to everyone, with a minimum of frills.

That hardly describes Facebook, which anyone can get lost in for hours and which has at least three “Dummies” books written about it.

In other words: Good luck, Google.

— Christopher Null is a technology writer for Yahoo! News.

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source : us.rd.yahoo.com

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Submited at Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 at 5:00 pm on tech by Alina
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