Google Goes Social

The social networking bug is not new for Google. Orkut has been Google's Facebook in Brazil. The service picked up in emerging economies like India, but then got slumped by the Facebook and Twitter avalanche. Google is planning a comeback. According to reports, Google will add Facebook-like status update features to its Gmail service.

Gmail already has the feature where you can update your status, but it's not as dynamic or interactive as is Facebook. You can't comment or start a discussion thread on Gmail status.

Much will depend on how much effort Google puts in behind their Gmail social networking service. But, if they do do it well, it can blow Facebook off which has of-late become more of a nuisance. Every now and then, there are policy and privacy changes and users are clueless about the new features. Their unstable privacy policies can let anyone with malicious intentions gain access to your critical information.

This could be a good time for Google to put a hole in Mark Zuckerberg's 'science' project. The Facebook founder went overboard when he called himself a 'prophet'. He also made a lot of 'prenatal' predictions that people will soon have no qualms about privacy. He is way wrong. This is the gestation period of full-blown social networking sites. People have not started to realize what they are doing. Once people start realizing that the channel [Facebook] through which they are sharing private information is porous, they will start putting bricks around it.

Facebook and its ally Microsoft are getting access to a lot of personal information about individuals, which is dangerous, in the light of unstable privacy policies. Facebook's deal with McAfee is also a kind of intrusion, where the company can scan your hard drive to check if their is any malware or virus on it. If you want to use Facebook you have to buy the McAfee anti-virus solution. This is an anti-competition deal. Things seem to be getting uglier.

Google, on the other hand is becoming omnipresent, which is another concern. However, it's too early to say anything. Google doesn't have a very good record of successful services-- Knol is an example. Next week will tell what Google has to get connected socially.