On the heels of finding out that Facebook had finally surpassed Google in total visits in August, Google CEO Eric Schmidt bared his teeth a bit at the recent Google Zeitgeist Conference in Scottsdale. According to John Brownlee, writing for Geek.com, Schmidt confirmed what most people suspected – “Google Me,” the company’s latest attempt at taking some of the social marketing energy that Facebook has all but snapped up , will debut this fall.
However, Schmidt was equally as adamant at insisting that Google Me was not going to be a hub for social networking. Rather, he sees the service as adding social networking capabilities to existing Google services, such as YouTube (you’d be notified if a lot of your friends were watching the same video, for example).
Brownlee says the industry is taking a “wait and see” attitude to see exactly what Schmidt and Google are up to. “Let’s just hope it’s not another ‘Buzz’ fiasco,” Brownlee says, referring to Google’s ill-fated Google Buzz project, which users never really accepted.
Meanwhile, other commentators see Schmidt’s comments as being much more mercenary, using such terminology as “Facebook-scraping,” and saying that Google is willing to take as much info from Facebook by any means possible. For example, Schmidt also announced that Google had recently invested over $100 million in the Zynga Company, developers of Facebook’s popular Farmville and Mafia Wars games.
Then, says Seth Weintraub at Fortune Magazine, there’s this quote from Schmidt’s Google Zeitgeist speech:
"The best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data. Failing that, there are other ways to get that information."
What are those ways, Weintraub asks? He envisions someone creating a cartoon of Schmidt saying, “We have ways of making you talk. Mwahahahahah…”
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