14 DAY TRIAL // Google and Facebook are gearing up for war, that much is obvious, and the competition between the two companies promises to be the spectacle of next few years. Facebook's latest move, Places, is another stab at Google and its own mapping-centric products.
The name says it all, Google also has a product named Places which aggregates data from several sources about a location, be it a venue or a landmark. The idea is to give users a central place to get as much info about a place as possible and to lure in advertisers at the same time.
While Facebook Places does a lot of things differently, at heart it's pretty much the same thing, a central repository of info about a place. Users could go to a Google Place page or a Facebook Place page to find roughly the same things. Facebook just adds a social spin to the concept.
But 'social' is a driving force today and Facebook's success so far is all the proof you need. The social network has already gotten to 500 million users and, though financially is nowhere near Google, it's on its way to becoming the largest website on the planet.
And Google is feeling the pressure whether it likes to admit it or not. Just one day after Facebook made its big Places launch, Google boasted about the 100 million people using Google Maps for Mobile.
The post just lists some of the transformations of the mobile Google Maps over the years and boasts about its wide reach. While Google says the timing is nothing more than a coincidence, it's hard to believe it.
What's more, the post comes from Google's VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra who, up until recently, ran the company's mobile operations. But he is now said to head Google's efforts to create a social network to rival Facebook, dubbed Google Me, the biggest project at the search company at the moment.