After Kevin Rose (founder of Digg) dropped the rumour bomb in late June of the arrival on the scene of Google Me the webby world has been beside itself with excitement’ “what will it be like”, “will I be able to move easily from Facebook”, “what will Zuckerberg say”, etc.
The ground does seem to be being cleared for a wholesale assault on the social networking world. Google Buzz and it’s other social application Orkut haven’t really made the grade. Google Wave was also sunk recently so maybe it’s time for Google have another crack at it? Famous for “non-pretty” but very usable interfaces it will be interesting to see how they compete with the prettier Facebook.
Google’s mainstay of consumer penetration (outside of search) is GoogleMail and that is really starting to come under attack, not from another webmail provider but from a shift away from using email and using cloud-enabled, device independent portals such as Facebook, LinkedIn, mySpace etc.
If email is dead in the longer term then the only way to intercept the conversations people are having (and interject advertising?) is by running a big social network or a platform that allows people to communicate simply. I suspect we won’t have long to wait, some people think the recent Google home page madness is signalling something.
