Pro social
A large proportion of recent smartphone launches have focused on social networking. The consensus seems to be that consumers will be driven to upgrade their handsets by their desire to interact with their social networks, on the move, as easily as possible.
It stands to reason, therefore, that in its desire to grab as big a piece of the mobile Internet pie as possible Google will be looking closely at providing more social networking tools itself, to complement things like Gmail and Blogger. The growing intimacy between Microsoft and Facebook will serve to further fuel that ambition.
The WSJ wrote yesterday that Google will be adding a module to Gmail that will display a stream of status updates along the lines of a Twitter feed, or Facebook status update log. Its sources say this will be integrated with content from other Google-owned sites like Picasa and YouTube. This would make it a pretty powerful tool, but Google has yet to officially comment.
WSJ sister site Barrons has also briefly reported that Google will host a live webcast on YouTube "to unveil some new product innovations," at 6pm UK time today, but it doesn't know what they might be. The smart money would appear to be on the Gmail announcement.
Not mentioned in the story is Orkut - Google's own social networking service - which has been branded a relative failure, but has a fair few users thanks to its popularity in Brazil and India. If Google make it easy for users to link all these resources together through an intuitive web interface, it may have a chance of giving Facebook and Twitter a run for their money.
