"Ok, umm huge rumor: Google to launch facebook competitior very soon "Google Me", very credible source."
All it took was Digg's founder, Kevin Rose, to slide one tweet on Twitter. One simple tweet, and over a million followers got that bit of gold on their timelines. In between Saturday night, and this afternoon, the Google Me rumor spread all over the internet. And curiously enough, the tweet in question has disappeared. (from Twitter.) Rose has a history of spreading rumors that turn out to be true after the initial leak. He's also a very well connected individual, so this "very credible source" may very well be speaking the truth, and Google could be taking yet another stab at getting into social media.
Thus far Google hasn't commented on all the speculation, so there's no real confirmation there, but if you've poked around at the assortment of things you can do with a Google account, they already offer all of the core features of a social networking site. If Google Me just ends up being an essential combination of these current things, with some new flair added on, they could have something on their hands. Whether or not Facebook should be worried about this can't be said as of yet, but it definitely is worth noting the fact that if having a Google account linked Google Me to things like Gmail, Buzz, or Orkut, saving current users the time and effort to create a profile and add things to it, it could start out with around 200 million users.
Keep in mind that 200 million is only around half the monster user base that Facebook already boasts. On top of that Facebook is showing incredible momentum, having had time to grow from something that just linked Harvard students together, into linking people together internationally. Since privacy has been a huge concern for a very long time, it's also worth noting that Google has already gone through it's own privacy shitstorm, and lot of people aren't quite ready to give Google another shot with their information.
That being said, if Google can really pull it together this time, and launch Google Me (should Google Me even exist) smoothly, and offer a privacy policy that the users of the internet can cope with, then there may actually soon be some real competition for Facebook. All we can do in the meantime is speculate, and wait for a Google rep to come out and say something official, so we can have something more tangible than a deleted tweet.
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