Former Facebook Executive Adam D’Angelo Confirms New Google Social Networking Effort
Google is making a new move into social networking, following past efforts like Orkut, Google Profiles and Buzz, according to a tweet by Digg founder Kevin Rose. He said so last weekend, but his tweet has since been deleted. Now early Facebook executive and Quora cofounder Adam D’Angelo says — on Quora, of course — that Rose was right. Here’s the text of the entry:
Adam D’Angelo, involved in Facebook early on
Here is what I’ve pieced together from some reliable sources:
• This is not a rumor. This is a real project. There are a large number of people working on it. I am completely confident about this.
• They realized that Buzz wasn’t enough and that they need to build out a full, first-class social network. They are modeling it off of Facebook.
• Unlike previous attempts (before Buzz at least), this is a high-priority project within Google.
• They had assumed that Facebook’s growth would slow as it grew, and that Facebook wouldn’t be able to have too much leverage over them, but then it just didn’t stop, and now they are really scared.
“Modeling it off Facebook” likely means creating a similar user interface, features like the news feed and personal profiles, if not data polices, developer platform, core applications and other important parts of Facebook today. Between services for mobile phone numbers, email, photos, video-sharing and much more, it has enough components to make its own, as many have speculated over the years. Facebook executives have cited Google as a potentially huge threat over the last couple of years. That’s even as other services have competed more directly with Facebook features, like Twitter with status updates.
Yahoo, AOL and other companies are also looking into building more of their own social networking services. They have their own history of failures, and their own need to succeed now; developers on Facebook are in turn gauging these new markets for their potential. So far, Facebook has managed to outpace other efforts, but as Rose and D’Angelo have heard, Google itself is now feeling forced to act.
June 28th, 2010 at 11:10 pm
great news ..i hope google kill facebook and make the largest social media in the world
June 29th, 2010 at 12:42 am
[...] on June 28th: “ Former Facebook Executive Adam D’Angelo Confirms New Google Social Networking Effort “ Latest update : “Former Facebook CTO: ‘Google Me’ Is Real, And It’s Gunning [...]
June 29th, 2010 at 12:57 am
I hope they succeed up to a point where they provide balance. It would be unhealthy for the market for one player to be dominant and in fact that becomes like Microsoft and now Apple, but balance is good.
It would be great if they can leverage the privacy concerns people have with facebook, with external govt spies using the facebook platform to spy on ordinary people and paedophiles using it to groom children facebook is a huge problem as far as security and privacy are concerned.
If they can get that right by leveraging a search engine, they can and are a real threat — oops they are doing that using bing.com, the caffiene update did google more harm than good as people are now turning to bing.com for their answers which look remarkabley like the old google search results.
But Balance is good.
June 29th, 2010 at 2:09 am
Go for it Google, it’s about time to see a good alternative to facebook
June 29th, 2010 at 2:54 am
[...] hindert den Internetgiganten aus Mountain View offenbar nicht daran, es trotzdem zu versuchen: Glaubt man den Gerüchten, so arbeitet Google unter dem Projekttitel “Google Me” derzeit mit Volldampf an einem [...]
June 29th, 2010 at 5:39 am
Buzz was an absolute kill-joy. All I wanted to tell Buzz was to Buzz off. Hopefully this one will be something worth looking forward to.
June 29th, 2010 at 7:14 am
[...] Il web già si interroga, come riporta l’Huffington Post: quelli di Inside Facebook si chiedono se il nuovo Google Me funzionerà come Buzz, ovvero sarà un tentativo di integrare una nuova [...]
June 29th, 2010 at 9:05 am
it would be nice to see the other way round also … facebook creating search engine and kills google .. ;)
June 29th, 2010 at 9:42 am
This will spur FB to go public sooner. All out war with Google will be costly and will need a huge warchest to keep ahead. It will also spur acquisitions from this as Google may have the currency with heir stock to buy app companies who can work off of their social graph.
June 29th, 2010 at 9:53 am
Wish Them Success atleast this Time!
June 29th, 2010 at 10:05 am
Someone needs to revisit the definition of “confirm.”
June 29th, 2010 at 10:28 am
[...] latest (apparently confirmed) rumor to hit the blogosphere is Google's in-development entry into social networking, Google Me, [...]
June 29th, 2010 at 10:56 am
please do it, please beat them, and be more open and honest with privacy. Zuckerberg seems like a deviant criminal and no one trusts him
June 29th, 2010 at 11:43 am
[...] [InsideFacebook] Categorized under Adam D'Angelo, Facebook If you liked this post, subscribe to the Pulse 2.0 RSS feed. [...]
June 29th, 2010 at 12:22 pm
[...] Eldon fra InsideFacebook henviser til kommentarer fra forhenværende direktør og medstifter af Facebook Adam D'Angelo, som [...]
June 29th, 2010 at 12:24 pm
Nothing says passion, a well thought out execution and striving for excellence more than “Google is really scared of Facebook and is creating a competing social network.” Orkut2, here we come. Special bonus points if you guess what country will adopt Google’s new social network.
June 29th, 2010 at 1:38 pm
I think they should name it BuzzPal (and make a deal for that name and trademark) :)
June 29th, 2010 at 2:11 pm
I don’t understand their strategy, what is the point of creating another Facebook without providing additional value to the users?
June 29th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
[...] to InsideFacebook, Google is looking to approach the social networking monstrosity once again from a different angle. [...]
June 29th, 2010 at 4:13 pm
Yea, I’ll be glad to see a real facebook killer. Facebook is getting scary.
June 29th, 2010 at 9:04 pm
[...] Eldon at InsideFacebook points to comments from former Facebook executive Adam D’Angelo, who says Google’s project is "not a [...]
June 29th, 2010 at 10:23 pm
From a market relevance point of view, now is the right time for any new social network to come out (Google being the most obvious choice to lead this charge, as they’ll need the money to get it right). Facebook had a dip in their relevance trending about 18-24 months ago when the early adopters went ‘so over this’ but a resurgence for Facebook came in the form of the ‘laggards’ (read: late adopters) finally getting tuned into Facebook and creating a second wave of market relevance. Now even the laggards are over it, but don’t have any choice. It’s a good time for something that offers similar opportunities to connect friends together to come into the market. The question will be if you can cross-platform, because there will be a divide in the way consumers use it if they can only use what their ‘mates’ are into….
June 29th, 2010 at 11:00 pm
Who says 500 million people use Facebook? Facebook? Well seeking advertising dollars they would wouldn’t they. But is it true? They say 1 billion people will be using Facebook shortly. That is roughly one in six of the world’s population. Given that only roughly 50% are online that means one in three human beings online will be using Facebook. Are one in 3 of your friends using Facebook? Do you think say one in 3 lets say 50 yr olds or 60 yr olds or 70 yr olds or out of 1.5 billion Chinese etc use the site? Think it through. Its total and utter nonsense. Pure hype. A con trick??????
June 30th, 2010 at 12:37 am
[...] completamente inadatte a competere con Facebook. Adam D’Angelo, ex dirigente di Facebook, sembra confermare che non si tratti di un rumor ma di un progetto sul quale Google sta investendo [...]
June 30th, 2010 at 3:01 am
[...] general consensus on the different tech-blogs (Gizmodo, InsideFacebook, Huffington Post, and others) is not very favourable as to the success of a Google Social Network, [...]
July 1st, 2010 at 12:10 pm
[...] Google is taking another shot at social networking, after earlier efforts fizzled. Their model, says Quora's Adam D'Angelo, is…Facebook. Which is hugely successful but also digitally sterile. No need to meet that old [...]
July 4th, 2010 at 7:07 pm
Don’t Google already have a social network – Orkut?
Facebook have proved that social networks are a natural monopoly. Switching costs are high and viral growth rules.
Google are going to have to do something really radical to stop Facebooks social graph becoming even more integral to online activity.
July 6th, 2010 at 6:02 pm
[...] on Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech, Rose repeated the assertion. Then, SF Weekly and a former Facebook executive also confirmed that their sources had provided the same [...]
July 12th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
[...] Adam D’Angelo, Gründer des Q*A Dienstes Quora ist es ein “echtes Projekt”, was von Google CEO Eric Schmidt [...]
July 26th, 2010 at 1:57 pm
[...] Adam D’Angelo, Gründer des Q*A Dienstes Quora ist es ein “echtes Projekt”, was von Google CEO Eric Schmidt [...]
August 5th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Orkut is a place of brazilians and fake profiles. Orkut sucks!
August 6th, 2010 at 1:09 pm
[...] to use in creating a credible social platform rival to Facebook. The product is still unclear, sounding something like a combination of Facebook’s home page and profile features and a developer [...]
November 10th, 2010 at 3:45 pm
Google definitely have the internal resources and smarts to pull this off. Hopefully they learned some important lessons from the failure that was ‘Buzz’.
March 15th, 2011 at 11:08 pm
[...] the buzz around GMail when it was launched.Quora was co-founded in 2009 by Adam D’Angelo (from Facebook) and Charlie Cheever; and soon they began attracting big names like Dustin Moskowitz (Facebook [...]