I was talking with a Google employee last night at the Graphing Social Media conference.
Aside: why are there more Google employees there than Facebook ones? I think Facebook’s attitude toward the community is saying volumes to all of us.
Anyway, he asked me to guess which Google service had the most page views every day.
Is it search? No.
Blogger? No.
Google Maps? No.
Picasa? No.
So, what is it?
Orkut.
Orkut?
Yeah. Now do you get why they just bought Jaiku?
Now do you get why the world is going to pay attention to what Google releases on November 5?
Yeah!
Facebook has real competition coming. Competition they haven’t yet faced.
It’s going to be an interesting period to watch them go at it.
I have 552 reasons to hate Facebook. I sure wish they would let me add more than 5,000 friends. If Google doesn’t have such a stupid limit that’ll get me to check it out, at minimum (I can’t add any more friends on Facebook).
A few months ago I interviewed the Jaiku founders. I found them to be very smart. This is a good purchase for Google. Add it onto their new social network that’s coming (Orkut 2.0) and Google just made a major move against Facebook.