Can Google improve on Facebook? The search giant is once again rumoured to be gearing up to launch yet another new service to challenge the dominance of the world’s most popular social network.

The chatter on TechCrunch and its rivals is that Google Me (apparently the name of the service under development) will essentially be a Facebook clone. But, if that is the case, why would anyone go to the considerable trouble of switching out of Facebook and into a very similar service? For me, Google has to do something different – it needs to create a mobile-orientated social networking service that people will use to manage their daily lives.

For starters, it should consolidate its battery of confusing and confused communications services, such as Google Latitude, Google Talk and Google Buzz, into one coherent offering. But it shouldn’t stop there. Google also needs to add its impressive augmented reality/local search service, Google Goggles, into the mix to create a social network designed specifically for people to connect better with the people they see regularly and their immediate locality.

I know there are plenty of location-based social networks already in existence, but Google uniquely already has the sophisticated maps and the vast index of web content needed to serve up highly-relevant local information. On the lower half of the home screen of your handset, a scrolling ticker tape could flag updates on anything relevant to you that is going on in your immediate vicinity, interspersed with news of which of your friends are nearby and links to their status updates. If you raise the phone to eye level, your handset screen would show you the direction of your friends or the event you are interested in, as well as how far away it is.

Of course, this would be a highly-intrusive service and the user would have to have total control over what appears on that ticker tape. But you would potentially want to connect both with people you know living in the same city and local restaurants, bars, cafes, art galleries, theatres, cinemas and other amenities that interest you. You might also connect with your workplace, your children’s schools and clubs, so they can keep you updated. In every case, the friend or institution would need to approve your request first.

Like Twitter, I would limit status updates to 140 characters, but each one should be tagged with a location on a Google map and a time-span. Once that time-span has expired, the status update could also expire. Connected users, would, of course, also be able to send each other private messages.

Multiple personas

To protect privacy, users would also be able to adopt multiple personas, enabling them to post status updates that will only be seen by designated people. Ideally, you could split your contacts into family, colleagues, close friends, acquaintances and local businesses. (I have long wanted Facebook to enable you to use your home page to manage several different streams of status updates directed at different groups of people.)

Clearly, there would be plenty of opportunities for Google to broker highly-targeted advertising with this kind of service, but it would need to be careful to maintain a balance firmly in favour of editorial, just as its search engine does today.

Unlike the many start-ups running location-based social networking and augmented reality services, Google has the cash and the marketing muscle, especially on the web, to gain some serious traction, especially if it can excite the same technorati that made Twitter and Foursquare famous. Clearly, Google can integrate the service into the mobile version of its web search service, as well as making it a default app on the home screen of Android phones (unless the handset maker removes it).

I have no idea if this is what Google is planning, but CEO Eric Schmidt’s recent heavy emphasis on mobile suggests that any new social networking service will have a strong mobile (i.e. location) element. Moreover, a straight Facebook clone is going to struggle to gain traction, just as Google Buzz has done.

In any case, one thing is clear. Google can’t allow Facebook, which now has half a billion users, to walk away with the keys to the social networking kingdom. If it so desires, Facebook has the potential to ensure that a huge raft of web content remains beyond the reach of Google’s search engine and advertising networks. With every new subscriber it adds, Facebook increases its leverage over Google.

Let’s see if the world’s most profitable web company can finally rise to the challenge.

 

David Pringle

This article was first published on the GSMA’s Mobile World Live portal. David moderates discussion forums on the site and is a freelance media and investor relations consultant.

The editorial views expressed in this article are solely those of the author(s) and will not necessarily reflect the views of the GSMA, its Members or Associate Members