Simrat Tatla's Blog

Facebook’s increasing popularity has overshadowed Google with web surfers spending more time on their Facebook accounts than on Google’s search engine.

Researchers from comScore Inc. have stated that people in the U.S. spend approximately 41.1 million minutes on Facebook and 39.8 million on Google. As Facebook fanatics would say, if Google had a Facebook profile, Facebook would have more “friends”.

Google, however, doesn’t lack the presence of their own social networking site, just a successful social networking site. Orkut, which was quite ineffective in the U.S.,  was Google’s attempt at creating a networking web page.

To compete with it’s rival, Facebook, Google is in the midst of developing a new “social networking feature”. By spending $182 million on Slide Inc. to help get this site up and moving, Google is expecting to get back in the race against Facebook to be the most trafficked site.

I’m all for taking risks, but how is Google so sure that this site will be any different from their past failed attempts? Is it worth it for Google to spend almost $200 million on establishing a site that has to compete with Facebook’s 500 million users?

http://www.theprovince.com/technology/Google+launch+social+networking+feature/3528629/story.html