'Scared Google about to launch Facebook rival'

Google, perhaps the only company with the clout and users to take on the seemingly unassailable Facebook, is reportedly working secretly on "Google Me", a product that would go head-to-head with the social networking giant.

The founder of popular link-sharing site Digg, Kevin Rose, kicked off a round of feverish speculation this week by tweeting that he had heard a "huge rumour" from a "very credible source" that Google was going to launch a Facebook competitor "very soon".

Rose has since removed the tweet, saying he was asked to do so.

Adam D'Angelo, former CTO of Facebook and now co-founder of social Q&A site Quora, added fuel to the fire by declaring "This is not a rumour. This is a real project". He claimed to have received information from "reliable sources".

The rumoured new site is expected to move beyond Google Buzz, a Twitter competitor recently launched as an add-on to Gmail that allows users to share links, photos, video and status messages. It has yet to take off after being embroiled in early privacy uproars, which have since been rectified.

Google already has a social networking product, Orkut, which was launched in January 2004 but only became popular in India and Brazil, where it is one of the most popular websites.

Google also has a location-sharing social product, Latitude, but it too has been dominated by start-ups, namely Foursquare.

"They realised that Buzz wasn't enough and that they need to build out a full, first-class social network. They are modelling it off of Facebook," wrote D'Angelo, describing it as a "high priority project".

"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."

Facebook has been embroiled in several privacy debacles of late, with users crying foul over attempts by the social networking site to get them to share more information publicly against their will.

But these have done little to stall its accelerating growth rate and it is expected to hit the 500 million user milestone shortly.

Pundits are saying that, despite also having hundreds of millions of users, Google would have a much harder time knocking off Facebook than Facebook had dethroning MySpace several years ago.

The site has become entrenched and users may be reluctant to switch to a new social networking site, as they would likely lose all of the photos, videos and other content uploaded to date.

"This is an enormous creative challenge," industry analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence told IDG, adding that Google would need to take a fresh approach rather than just emulating Facebook.

But despite some social media failures, Google has tremendous clout with its other social products, including video sharing site YouTube, blog publishing site Blogger and photo sharing service Picasa.

These could be integrated into any new social networking site.

Google Australia declined to comment on the rumours.

- © Fairfax NZ News