Google, having dominated the search engine industry for quite a while now, desires to conquer the social networking world too. This exact motive of Google’s has compelled it to ideate and carry out talks with leading online game developers like Playdom Inc, Electronic Arts Inc’s Playfish and Zynga.
Rumour has it that of these three, Google has already made an investment in Zynga that approximately amounts up to $100 million, for the very purpose of launching an online gaming site. Google owns and manages Orkut, which apparently was the first to revolutionize social-networking in India with about 16 million users. However, with the introduction of Facebook in India and the fact that its user-base reached 15 million in no time, along with Twitter’s stiff competition with about 4 to 4.5 million users, Orkut’s fate seems to be in trouble.
To counter this contest, Google has readied and executed a number of product offerings which have not fetched the anticipated gains. First, there was the launch of Google Buzz, a social-networking site built by Google to supposedly beat Facebook; but Buzz was given a ‘thumbs down’ by users with complaints of them being connected to unwanted acquaintances (like ex-husbands) and spam attacks on their inboxes. Buzz failed to impress.
Attempt number 2 is called Google Me, which is still speculated to see daylight since its news of being launched in the recent past; and hence to judge this attempt to be a failure as well would be too pre-mature. Google Me is stated to be an amalgamation of Wave and Latitude into one social network site. The latest news of Google starting off a social gaming site could be attempt number 3 and a new hope to revive itself and proclaim the number one spot in the social networking space. While things stand still for Google, at the other end of the river Facebook plans to set up an operations office (both online operations and user operations) in India considering the fact that the country proves to be a potential social networking market. This move is in light of Facebook’s plan of expanding operations in India by initiating local programs (that are in line with Indian customs) and building partner relationships accordingly. The number of acquisitions in the social media website field has multiplied in the last few months.
To name a few:
• MTV acquires Social Express and plans to initiate social games.
• Walt Disney embraces the social media phenomenon by buying Playdom Inc.
• A retailer of video games and accessories takes over Kongregate, a social gaming destination.
Should we expect a similar sort of acquisition strategy to be deployed by Google? Or would it launch a completely new and unique social gaming site that is even more exciting than Facebook? Only time will tell.
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