Google faces up to Facebook

MUCH EXCITEMENT in California where it has been announced that Google is building its own answer to the Web 2.0 dream machine that is Facebook.

Regular readers, and some irregular ones too, will recall that last week’s Microsoft stake in the firm gave the Facers a paper valuation of $15 billion. Not bad when all the assets executives own is a web hosting provider contract, four PCs, one Mac, a sixteener conker and an incomplete set of Daredevil from 1974 to 1978. And even those comics really belong to their parents - nuff said, as Stan Lee used to say.

Google is looking increasingly like Microsoft these days in its determination to cover every base. Its new effort, OpenSocial, offers freebie tools so that social-networking developers can build apps that run not just on Google’s Orkut service (popular in some geographies but not the very biggest ones) but also on rival services such as LinkedIn.

The betting?

Well, Google has oodles of cash so it can’t be written off. After all, Microsoft did for entrenched rivals such as WordPerfect, Lotus and Borland in other fields.

Facebook has first-mover advantage but then so did Adam - and look what happened to him. µ