Google Facebook killer “Google Me” is no rumour
With Google Buzz having proved more of a bust than a buzz the search giant isn’t hanging around licking its wounds and is instead pushing on and having another stab at social networking called “Google Me”.
UPDATE The rumour kick started yesterday in a tweet by Digg founder Kevin Rose (which he has since removed) about Google Me is the real thing, according to Adam D’Angelo, the former Facebook’s CTO and founder of Q&A service Quora.
D’Angelo shared what he knows/has heard on Google Me in an answer to a question on Quora (“Google Me” a fake rumour? Misleading evolutionary product update? Or is it really a new social network from Google?”).
D’Angelo, wrote: “Here is what I’ve pieced together from some reliable sources:
* 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.
From Monday - The source of the story is a tweet by Digg founder Rose who wrote “Ok, umm, huge rumor: Google to launch facebook competitor very soon ‘Google Me’, very credible source”.
With Google Buzz being such a disappointment and suffering terrible (and avoidable) privacy issues for Google that this is going to be fascinating to watch.
There are a few questions that another Google foray into social networking throws up: 1) Can Google do social networking?; 2) Is there really any such thing as a Facebook killer?; 3) Is Google Buzz now dead and buried; 4) What was Google Wave again?; 5) Does anyone use personalised Google homepages?
See plenty of questions and really some answers as I’m betting if Google executives learnt only a few things from the Google Buzz debacle (other than privacy) it is that you need to step away from email and create a fresh environment for people to pay in rather than trying to shoehorn one thing into another, which is kind of what Buzz felt like to me.
In February, Google was forced to make a series of changes to Buzz after it was slammed for breaching the privacy of internet users by exposing their personal details to the world.
Anyway, back to Google Me. It’s a great name. Everyone has googled themselves at one time or another (some people do it every day, you know like exercise), but weirdly/co-incidentally it is also the name of a little documentary about a guy called Jim Killeen who Googled himself and then went on to track down all the other people called Jim Killeen. He called it Google Me.
As Killeen says himself: “It all started when I Googled my name”. Maybe that is where it is going to start for Google as well (okay I have no idea what that last sentence means, but it sounded good).
All Comments
I lol’d at the end
Not sure Google Me is a good name – sounds a little cheesy. I suspect Google is too famous a mega-corp brand now for people to open up to it in the same way they have done and continue to do so with Facebook.
It will have to have some astonishing USP to attract people to transfer. If they do an “Import Photos from Facebook” feature they deserve a substantial hi-five.
@JMQ am guessing it is a working title, but then looking at Google Buzz (and considering Yahoo also had a buzz product) they don’t push themselves on the naming process.
Dave Gorman did it about 2 years ago. Google it. “I’m Dave Gorman”
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