by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: August 03, 2010

Google Me is the source of many rumors and articles about the monster's desire to start a social networking platform that would rival Facebook. According to his Mashable.com article from June, 2010, Stan Schroeder indicates that Google is actually working on such a project, but that there is no more firm information about an actual launch or inception of Google Me.

It all began with Google Buzz and Orkut, both of which failed to provide much more than either a copy of another service social networking platform like twitter, or which had serious privacy issues. Google Buzz incorporates some of the elements of Facebook, such as photo sharing, profile pages and networking with other friends on Google, but there is much that is missing in comparison to Facebook.The assumption, however, was that Facebook would be slow growing enough to allow Google to take its time in catching up.

This is not the case, and now Facebook has a solid, cemented place as the monster of social networking, despite the recent and major privacy scandal. Facebook may be in a position to not give anything up to any competition, especially if Google only comes up with a copy of whatever it is that Facebook provides.

Tom Krazit at CNETcontinues with the theme of Google's inability make a big splash by into social media and seems to confirm that Google Me is an attempt to battle with Facebook.

The new development group and strategy is intended to tackle some of the problems and issues that Google has had in developing an attractant in social media and social networking, including privacy and showing a better alternative to Facebook that has more to offer, not just another version of Facebook.

Google is already a monster of services and features in the areas of research, the collaborative giant that is Google Earth, in mobile applications and in indexing the massive amount of content that is on the web. Google has the "powered by" reputation that is all over the web in the form of google search, google adsense and other services.

This means that Google already has services that could be of benefit in social networking, especially in the area of filtering and indexing social networking content and people.

This, being a battle between the well fixed and established social networking success of Facebook and the uphill climb of Google Me, is one to watch.

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