location based blog: How Google Is Secretly Building Its Facebook Killer (GOOG)

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

How Google Is Secretly Building Its Facebook Killer (GOOG)

larry page

Facebook knows who you are, who your friends are, and just about everything you and your friends "like" – to read, to buy, to look at – on the Internet.

This scares the pants off Google.

To Valley and tech types, Facebook's collection of data is known as the "social graph."

The reason it worries Google is that increasingly, Facebook is using that data to show users things to read, buy, and do on the Internet before those users get the chance to Google search for those things.

The social graph turns the Internet into Facebook's platform, not Google's.

Again – that worries Google silly. As it should.

So, what is Google doing about it? Many things, including launching new social products, like +1, in hopes of gathering "social graph" information through its own products. Larry Page also recently told all Google employees that their bonuses will depend on Google succeeding in social.

But Google also seems to be pulling another, more clever trick.

It seems to be scanning the contents of its users Gmail inboxes for email notifications from outside social networks, and then asking users if they want to "improve your Google experience by connecting your accounts from other services."

Check out the screengrab below. Note where, at the bottom, it says "Use my Google contact information to suggest accounts from other sites."

An industry source who competes with Google says, "They are doing this to assemble another copy of the graph by scraping other sources rather than making their own."

"Why make your own when you can steal someone else's?"

Why not, indeed? This seems like a clever move, and, given that checkbox, not particularly "evil" – which we know is something Google is sensitvive about.

Anyway, here's the screengrab:

Google graph