Twitter-Killer From Google?
By Partho, Gaea News NetworkTuesday, February 9, 2010
Gmail would be Google’s new bet to capture social media. After a no-so-successful venture into social networking with Orkut, the search engine giant would be taking its chances against the microblogging ace Twitter and the most popular social network Facebook. Complying with its diversification efforts Goolge plans to transform Gmail into a more sociable media allowing users to view media and status updates shared online by their friends. According to WSJ, Google is likely to announce the new features for Gmail within this week.
The new changes include addition of a module to the Gmail screen that will display a stream of updates from individuals a user chooses to connect. The format was popularized by Facebook and Twitter.
Imitating Facebook and Twitter, Goolge would be allowing Gmail users a place to see what’s up with their friends. However, Gmail is an email services and it is not clear how Goolge would blend sending emails with browsing friends content. For some years now, Google had been trying to turn Gmail into more than just an email service. Currently, Gmail offers an “away message” that can be linked to the website that friends can see when they message them.
According to sources in WSJ, the new stream on Gmail would include users content shared on Google’s YouTube and Picasa photo service. Inclusion of the mentioned features are speculative and remains unclear.
Last week Facebook rolled out a new Facebook Layout that introduces a new message inbox, which closely resembles Gmail’s email inbox. This places Google on thin ice, as Facebook has roughly 400 million users more than double the Gmail users.
Google idea would integrate social networking with emailing, proving a common interface for both services. With the status updates available on Gmail, the users might stick to the same interface and not move out to use Twitter. In case, Google succeeds in its venture Twitter could be at the receiving end.
Given the apprehensions, it remains to see how Google handles the larger issues, specifically, all your contacts on Gmail might not be the people with whom you wanna share your status updates.
