Google Friends & Updates to take on Facebook

Even if the opposite poles - Google and Facebook join hands for an Android app, the cold war between the two Silicon Valley giants continue. This time Google is going the social networking way, writing on the wall against Facebook. Setting its foot into social networking, Google released two new features called Friends and Updates. The updated features would allow Google users to share their activities with other friends. Clearly, it seems Goolge is copying Facebook’s style of sharing what on your mind. Facebook and Twitter have gained popularity at least to some extent by letting users make updates about what they are doing. Twitter allows updates of short messages, where as Facebook offers an update stream of various activities. This move by Google is a direct challenge to Facebook.

Let’s back up a second, Google has allowed the users to see home page called iGoogle. With it you track weather, socks and news, anything that might be you have found useful for yourself.  All these while Google had been working to leverage its cross-site platform protocol called OpenSocial. You might communicate with the third party application directly from the iGoogle website.

Until now Google’s had activities have been limited. With the inclusions of latest features the search engine giant make its foray into social networking. The recent features released by Google has its own touch. Now it will allow users of Google will be able to share information with your friends. Google also added social features to Reader (used for reading and sharing RSS feed).

Friends group

Google also announced a Friends group today that would carry the list of friends you can create based on a subset of users Google Contacts has to interact and share social gadgets with.

Updates

For long the Updates had been unanimously associated with social networking site like Twitter and Facebook. Walking on their footsteps Google show your friends what you are up to when you share information from Google widgets ( actually Google calls them gadgets, but everyone else calls these windows of information widgets ). The updates let your friends see the things like photos, ratings and other actions you take from your Google home page.

Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, making its own moves against Google and Twitter with improved real-time search. You can see what your friends are doing on your updates page.