For months, a big play by Google in the social media sphere has been talked about. Supposedly they were cooking up something to compete against Facebook, to be called Google Me. It was talked about in tech circles so much that it was almost like it had already launched. But it always seemed a little strange because previous attempts to make Google more social (Wave, Buzz, Orkut) have either struggled or failed completely. Now the company says it’s not making a “traditional social network” after all. That could be a cute way of positioning themselves to announce something they call revolutionary or they could have been working on it and canceled it or it could just be that they’ve decided to stay in their lane a little more and work on search. “We do think that social is an ingredient for success for any app going forward, search and advertising being probably the best two examples that I would mention. So that’s how we’re thinking about the problem,” said Hugo Barra, Product Management Director for Mobile at a conference in Switzerland. He added that he thinks the name “Google Me” is awful.
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