Internet search leader Google Inc is not building a social network to compete with Facebook, a company executive reiterated on Thursday, despite an intensifying rivalry between the two leading Internet groups.
“We’re not working on a social network platform that’s just going to be another social network platform,” Google’s head of mobile product development, Hugo Barra, said in answer to a question at the Monaco Media Forum.
“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.”
Social networking has exploded in popularity and begun to reshape the balance of power in the Web industry. Facebook, launched in 2004, has more than 500 million members.
Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in September the company intended to add “layers” of social networking to its sites, rather than unveil a flashy product, but his remarks failed to quash speculation about a Google social network.
Google owns the social network Orkut, which is popular in Brazil and India but has failed to expand significantly beyond those markets.
This week, Google internally announced plans to boost salaries by 10 percent in a move widely seen as an effort to staunch a stream of engineers and managers leaving Google for faster-growing rivals like Facebook.
Google also said recently it planned to block Facebook and other Web services from accessing its users’ information, accusing Facebook of failing to reciprocate.
Simply creating a Facebook clone would be foolish, and of course Google denies that they are planning any such thing. Google apparently has something bigger up its sleeve that they hope will render Facebook obsolete, much like Facebook did to Myspace. However, given Google’s tarnished history with user privacy (to the point of nefariousness, some claim), it had better be good.