14 DAY TRIAL // Google's social plans are said to have been delayed and the Google Me project is not expected to debut until the first half of 2011 and not this year as was previously rumored. The project, which would add a social layer to Google's existing products, is the company's answer to Facebook's threat, but differences between the various teams involved have pushed its launch back for a few months.
According to Mashable, Google Me is now planned for launch in March, April 2011. This should give Google more time to create a cohesive social strategy for its products.
The company has struggled to come up with a popular social product. The ones it bought have mostly fumbled and internal projects haven't fared any better.
Orkut, a traditional social network that Google bought a few years ago, has become irrelevant in most of the world and only has a strong following in India and Brazil.
In the latter country, it still has about three times as many users as both Facebook and Twitter, but the two are closing the gap.
Google Buzz, the hyped project that was going to be Google's big social product hasn't exactly taken off and, while the company won't release usage numbers, it poses no threat of replacing Twitter any time soon.
Yet Facebook's threat can't be ignored. With the company now valued at about a quarter of Google's worth, based on speculative second market trading since Facebook is not a public company, and over 500 million users worldwide, many are saying that the social network is replacing Google as the service that binds the web together.
Google Me is most likely one of the company's last chances to become relevant in the social web space so it's understandable that Google is treating it with the utmost importance.
Whether this will be enough to make it a hit, from a company that doesn't really seem to understand social, remains to be seen.
Yet, from what Google has said so far, labeling Google Me not as one product, but as a strategy of adding social features to existing products, it doesn't sound like the best approach.
Apparently, this has led to some internal turmoil as the different teams working on the project have different visions of what it should be. Still, it's too early to pass judgement and the longer development time might prove fortuitous in the end.