Google prepares Facebook assault

09-febrero-2010

Google is set to make a fresh attempt to gain a stronger foothold in the booming social networking business on Tuesday as it seeks to counter the growing threat that Facebook poses to some of its core services. The search company is preparing to announce new features for Gmail that would extend the capabilities of the internet-based e-mail service to mirror some aspects of the fast-growing social networking site, according to a person familiar with its plans. However, earlier Google efforts to establish a presence in social networking have failed to gain much traction and analysts said that the company was still likely to find it difficult to turn the tables on Facebook with its latest plan. “Anything Google does with Gmail should be seen as a defensive manoeuvre,” said Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner. “In non-work settings, the trajectory favours Facebook. Increasingly, people are staying inside [the social networking site],” he said. Google’s Chat service, which is part of Gmail, already allows users to post short “status updates”, similar to the messages they can post on Facebook or Twitter. Google is planning to give Gmail users a way to aggregate the updates of their various contacts on the service, creating a stream of notifications that would echo the similar real-time streams from Facebook and Twitter, according to reports. All e-mail services will be forced to add such social elements as they seek to counter the threat posed by Facebook as it moves more heavily into communications, Mr Valdes said. Facebook has a messaging service through which users can communicate directly with one another but it remains rudimentary and is not connected to other e-mail systems. According to a report on the tech website TechCrunch, Facebook is planning to upgrade this messaging service to compete directly with Gmail and other internet-based mail systems. Google’s decision to exploit the heavily-used Gmail service as the basis for its latest assault on the social networking business partly reflects the failure of earlier stand-alone efforts to enter the sector. Its Orkut networking service, though launched before Facebook, has failed to gain a mass following in most parts of the world, despite success in Brazil, and its acquisition of Twitter rival Jaiku ended in failure after it scrapped development of the service. With more than 150m unique users a month, according to ComScore, Gmail could provide Google with a stronger launchpad into social networking. Along with the status updates facility in Gmail, Google has a number of other elements that, combined, offer a basic alternative to Facebook. Fuente: www.ft.com

< Anterior		Siguiente >