Will Google Me Play?

Are comparisons between Google Me and Facebook warranted at this point?

By Mala Bhargava

The king of search had just settled into a comfortably large space on the internet when everything around suddenly went social. Netizens were talking to each other, networking, sharing, and forming surprisingly strong communities.
One thing was for sure — they didn’t need Google for absolutely everything any more. Far from owning all the information in the universe, as Google always wanted to, the tech giant found significant chunks of it were slipping out of grasp. It was almost Search vs. Social as something started to become bigger than Google; incredibly, it was Facebook.

Soon, there was no doubt about it. Google couldn’t just sit it out. It had to do something big, social, sticky and lucrative. Google’s first attempt at taking on Facebook through its Buzz fell victim to a barrage of privacy concerns. Nobody thought that would be the end of it, and another front would be opened. And would be Google Me, Google’s new social networking platform. Except: what does it look like?

Rumorsville

Whatever it is Google has been working on all this while, it isn’t telling. Rumors have been blazing through the internet for months now, all starting with Adam D’Angelo, ex Facebook CTO and now founder of Quora which is an interesting question-and-answer crowd sourced site. D’Angelo got it from “reliable sources” that Google was working on a Facebook killer.

Next, Digg’s Kevin Rose added to the rumor and it was soon being said that Google was not only working on a social networking site, but that it was doing so very busily, on top priority.

After a bit, it was rumored that Google would be slipping in social networking features into Google Profiles, just as it had planted Buzz in your Gmail a few months earlier. This wasn’t a particularly comfortable thought at all, as the privacy concerns from the Buzz fiasco still haven’t been forgotten – or forgiven. If Google thought Buzz would compete with Facebook or Twitter, it had another thought coming.

Google, of course, already has a social networking site in Orkut, but it’s hardly managed to take that anywhere beyond India and Brazil. Even in India, Facebook is rapidly gaining ground, with number of users crossing 12 million in July 2010. It was thought Orkut would now be redeveloped in some way by Google to become a rival to Facebook. Well, we’ll have to see, won’t we.

On to something

A wonderful presentation from a Google employee had everyone sit up and realize Google was really exploring social media deeply. And what’s more, they seemed to be on the right track. Paul Adams, “Googler” with the company’s User Research for Social department, explained how social media was just our online lives trying to catch up with our real lives. Only problem is, networks like Facebook clubbed everyone together in ways that really do not mirror real-life relationships.

Using interesting examples, Adams showed how the mother of two ten-year-olds discovered to her horror that they could see all her interactions and comments on photos of her gay friends. She was aghast at not having realized this herself and upset that a system would allow for such a situation. So, will Google manage to create a new environment in its Google Me that circumvents such problems? That’s something we don’t know yet.  The presentation has been described as non geeky, giving rise to the hope that Google could actually get it right.

Socially clueless

Over the years, Google has acquired many platforms and technologies that could have gone full-fledged social if they had been worked that way. There are lists of these online.

The thing is, at its core Google and its engineers and technologists, have never managed social networking well. Orkut stayed where it was and is now declining even in India and facing problems in Brazil. And look at YouTube. A platform that had potential for much more than being a video sharing site, it’s not been expanded to be the Facebook killer it really could have been. Wave, a more serious collaborative platform, isn’t even understood by those who signed up for it. So, what could Google now be doing that is as social and as big, if not bigger, than Facebook?

Games @ Google

Moving out of the realm of rumors, Google has been talking to gaming companies including Playdom Inc, Electronic Arts’ Playfish and most significantly, Zynga. Now, those are the guys that created the flamingly popular Farmville and Mafia Wars on Facebook with whom they share revenue for the gaming-related activities. In fact, Google has now invested between $100 and $200 million in Zynga, according to TechCrunch rumors. Google CEO Eric Schmidt was quizzed about these talks and whether it meant creating a gaming platform just like Facebook’s. He said the world didn’t need a copy. Quite right too.

But Schmidt didn’t say what was going on with the games and with Google Me, if that’s what it will really be called. Whether the games will be one part of the social puzzle Google is trying to solve or whether it will be the epicenter around which social networking will take place, no one knows. If it goes predominantly gaming, a new social network will restrict itself right from the start. Farmville may be overwhelmingly popular, but there’s much else to Facebook’s success.

So is social gaming going to be the playpen of Google Me, diverting one type of user into fun activities while leaving others to go about their business and networking? The next few weeks will tell us more.

Meanwhile, Facebook continues to fine tune it’s targeting of users, making more advertising dollars than Google would like to see shifting away from its own search properties. Not only that, Facebook has thrown a googly at Google by starting up Facebook Questions, a similar platform to the one on LinkedIn and Quora. That does it. Let’s see what Google throws back.