Google’s latest large scale attempt to challenge the rise of Facebook is rumored to be a project entitled ‘Google Me’. However, as Facebook continues to stomp across the planet gobbling up new users at a rate of millions per day, is Google simply barking up the wrong tree?
Facebook was started in a Harvard dorm a mere six years ago by Mark Zuckerberg. 15 months ago it had 200 million users. Now it has 500 million users and Zuckerberg recently said this figure will soon rise to one billion. A billion? That would give Facebook the third biggest population on the planet behind India and China. Facebook seems unstoppable at the moment, having spread across the globe wiping out once great social networks like MySpace in the US and Bebo in the UK. In Germany it has overtaken StudiVZ and is now catching up with Orkut (the most popular social network in India and Brazil).
Google is right to be concerned on many fronts. Facebook isn’t just a social network. Much of the activity on Facebook is invisible to Google’s search engine and Facebook’s users post billions of links driving traffic across the web. This is/was Google’s primary job. And then there’s the advertising model. With 500 million subscribers, Facebook now knows an awful lot of detail about an awful lot of people. For every targeted ad a Facebook user receives it means one less ad Google will serve.
Three years ago Facebook was only available in the English language and had 30 million users. Today it is available in 80 languages and has nearly half a billion users. It is largely blocked in China and isn’t yet popular in Japan, South Korea and Russia, so there remains huge potential for the site.
The key to Facebook’s successful momentum is its growing revenues. It now earns about $1 billion a year and invests this in the best developers and engineers money can hire. Its strategy to create a platform for outside software developers is also crucial to its growth, especially in the enormous arena of social gaming.
If Google is going to launch ‘Google Me’, it had better be good. Very good. Otherwise Zuckerberg & Co. have little to fear.

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