Online search giant Google is understood to be in talks with makers of popular online games to develop a broader social networking service to compete with Facebook.
Attributing the story to people familiar with the matter, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google has been in discussions with top developers like Playdom Inc, Electronic Arts Inc’s Playfish and Zynga Game Network Inc – a company in which Google recently took a financial stake – to offer their games on a new platform.
However, it is unclear, when Google would launch the new gaming service. The report says the plans are not finalised yet.
Google already owns and operates the social networking site Orkut. According to the report, Google’s push into social games represents the latest attempt by the web-search leader to capture users and advertising dollars that are increasingly flowing into social networking — an area dominated by Facebook and Twitter. For social-game developers, a successful Google offering would mean they wouldn’t be so heavily dependent on Facebook, where the vast majority of users access the games.
The threat from Facebook is serious. The site has around 500 million users globally. India has an estimated 4-4.5 million users on Twitter and over 15 million Facebook users while Orkut users are pegged around 16 million. But Facebook is catching up fast. In April, a comscore study revealed that Facebook.com ranked as the top social network across the majority of individual markets in the Asia-Pacific region. However, some of the competing brands commanded the top position in certain markets, including Orkut in India, Mixi.jp in Japan, CyWorld in South Korea and Wretch.cc in Taiwan.
“...This (prediction of 500 million users) is a confirmation of what we predicted last year in our report Gartner’s Top Predictions for IT Organisations and Users, 2010 and Beyond: A New Balance,” says Monica Basso, Research VP at Gartner. According to Gartner, by 2012 Facebook will become the hub for integration of social networks, as well as for social extensions of traditional websites and applications.
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Meanwhile, India has become important to Facebook. This July, the site announced two key appointments to launch its operations office in India — Krithiga Reddy will be Facebook’s India director for online operations and Manoj Varghese will join as the director of user operations. Both will be based in Facebook’s new in Hyderabad. Facebook also intends to expand its management team in India, adding leadership that will specialise in spearheading local programs and building partner relationships.
Incidentally, when Google launched Google Buzz in February, nearly 180 million Gmail users started pinging friends, leaving competitors – Twitter, Facebook and MySpace – harping on a new strategy to counter the move.