The news that Google Me is getting ready for launch is a little confusing. Why is Google trying to take on a well-established service/site/social outlet like Facebook? It’s not in line with their brand.
On top of that one very good reason, they’re going to have to offer something incredibly advanced over Facebook to get people to change over. After all, people are pretty entrenched now on Facebook, at least for the foreseeable future.
One could say that people were saying the same thing about Facebook when they were the new kid and MySpace was the standard. But MySpace lost the lead because of a lot of things they did, rather than just because Facebook was overwhelmingly better. MySpace and its crazy quilt backgrounds – which made reading anything impossible – and their inability to police behavior were major factors to their decline.
Facebook, though they’ve hit some potholes, has maintained general good will with their users. Even if some of the potholes were of their own making.
So why would search engine giant Google be entering this race? Although it doesn’t make a lot of sense at the moment, I can see exactly what the reasons would be. And it has everything to do with their bottom line. More in the next post.