Will Google produce a Facebook killer?

Filed in archive strategy on June 28, 2010

The big rumour doing the rounds now is that Google is about to launch a Facebook killer.

It all started with a Sunday tweet from Digg founder Kevin Rose. "Ok, umm, huge rumor: Google to launch facebook competitor very soon "Google Me", very credible source".

Google has been there before. Remember Google Buzz, the so-called Twitter killer? That didn't exactly set the world on fire and, like Facebook, ran into privacy issues. That's something I blogged about here.

So how will Google Me work? And what will it do to Facebook?

According to PC Mag , Google Me could be just a re-hash of Google Profiles. But that's just a guess.

If it's true, it's hard to see how this would knock Facebook off. Facebook already has 500 million users. It's too big to kill. As Abinhav Lal writes in thinkdigit , Google will have a seriously hard time pulling people away from Facebook.

Indeed, Google is unlikely to kill Facebook any more than Facebook is about to kill Google. We're talking about two behemoths here, each blessed with massive markets. And as Garrett Rogers writes in ZDNet, Google is likely to run into a privacy problem of three if it heads down this direction. Pretty much the same as those that confronted Facebook.