Google Prepping Twitter, Facebook Rival

Google Prepping Twitter, Facebook Rival

Techtree News Staff, Feb 09, 2010 1414 hrs IST

New social product to be integrated with Gmail

Later today, Google is due to launch a social product that will compete with the currently popular social networks - Facebook and Twitter. As Wall Street Journal reported, Gmail will get a new module that will stream media and status updates of online friends. This module sounds like a Gmail Labs feature which could be enabled or disabled by account holder's choice.

However, it's less likely to be a rival since Google itself has integrated Twitter updates in its search. Maybe Google will bring Orkut updates integration in Gmail - well, that's just one of the many possibilities. Michael Arrington, TechCrunch CEO, noted that Google's upcoming social product will go beyond Gmail integration.

Google has already enabled watching YouTube videos in Gmail Chat. Also, YouTube, Flickr and Picasa media previews in mail have been there since a while. Whatever the integration into Gmail would be like, there's always a kill switch to bring the service back to normal.

If Google's upcoming social product affects Gmail, the fear of outages and security always persists. Not to forget that this announcement follows Facebook's homepage redesign and as we know, Google's online rival Microsoft is one of the stake holders in Facebook. In August 2009, Yahoo had introduced social features in its mail, search and messenger service.