Later today, Google is due to launch a social product that will compete with the currently popular social networks - Facebook


and Twitter. As Wall Street Journal reported, Gmail will get a new module that will stream media and status updates of online friends. This module sounds like a Gmail Labs feature which could be enabled or disabled by account holder’s choice.
However, it’s less likely to be a rival since Google itself has integrated Twitter updates in its search. Maybe Google will bring Orkut updates integration in Gmail - well, that’s just one of the many possibilities. Michael Arrington, TechCrunch CEO, noted that Google’s upcoming social product will go beyond Gmail integration.

Google has already enabled watching YouTube videos in Gmail Chat. Also, YouTube, Flickr and Picasa media previews in mail have been there since a while. Whatever the integration into Gmail would be like, there’s always a kill switch to bring the service back to normal.

If Google’s upcoming social product affects Gmail, the fear of outages and security always persists. Not to forget that this announcement follows Facebook’s homepage redesign and as we know, Google’s online rival Microsoft is one of the stake holders in Facebook. In August 2009, Yahoo had introduced social features in its mail, search and messenger service.

New data this week shows Facebook Inc. has grown into the biggest online social networking site in the U.S. as the dethroned No. 1, MySpace, revealed Tuesday it is downsizing its work force.Reports from comScore and the Conference Board this week both showed Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook has grown larger than it Los Angeles-based rival.

The comScore report for May showed Facebook with 70.278 million unique visitors in the U.S. compared to MySpace’s 70.255 million. The lead is even bigger worldwide, with MySpace at 123.2 million unique visitors last month compared with Facebook’s 307.1 million.

The Conference Board report on first quarter online users in the U.S. showed Facebook with an even larger lead, with 78 percent of social network participants, followed by MySpace (42 percent), LinkedIn (17 percent) and Twitter (10 percent).

Facebook said Tuesday that its users are now exchanging 1 billion chat messages a day using a new service it introduced last year.

MySpace, owned by News Corp. (NYSE: NWS) said Tuesday it will cut 30 percent of its work force (about 400 jobs), getting down about 1,000 workers.

Jonathan Miller, CEO of Digital Media at News Corp., said, “MySpace grew too big considering the realities of today’s marketplace.”

Google Trends was originally released as a tool that let you see visual comparisons between search volume of keywords. That hasn’t changed, but Google now also gives us the keys to more data about actual popularity of websites based on daily unique visitors.

This data is similar to what companies like Alexa already provides, but it’s not ready to be a complete replacement yet. There is not as much data available through Google Trends as there is in other tools. Searches are currently limited to the domain level — so blogs.zdnet.com would translate to zdnet.com before the search happens.

If you have a popular enough website to be included in these results from Google Trends, you may be disappointed to know that there is no way to remove your site if you wanted to. Google doesn’t think that rule should apply to them though, as they have removed all their web properties — searching for things like google.com or youtube.com comes back with nothing.

Many members of the so-called Web 2.0 generation of Internet companies, such as social-networking sites, blogs and other similar “social media,” have made little revenue, the Financial Times reported.Roger Lee, a partner at Battery Ventures, told the FT there is going to be a “shakeout” in the industry in the next year or two, with many Web 2.0 companies disappearing.
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Social networking sites need more regulation in order to ensure that they won’t pose major security risks to users, according to the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA). The agency issued a preliminary version of its General Report (PDF) covering online security this morning, pointing out that it views social networks as a “positive social phenomenon” that are not without their own set of security problems, and the organization has a set of recommendations meant to protect users online. ENISA said that some of the main threats identified so far through social networks involve digital dossiers, face recognition, and social engineering attacks on enterprises. Phishing attacks, reputation damage, ID theft, stalking, and cyberbullying are common as well. The organization says that, because of the human desire to connect and the growing popularity of social networks, it’s easy for users to let their guards down and not be aware of the size of the audience accessing their information. “Social Networking may be seen as a ‘digital cocktail party,’” read the report. “However, compared with a real-world cocktail party, [social networking service] members broadcast information much more widely and sometimes unadvisedly, either by choice or unwittingly.”

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