MySpace.com, Facebook.com and others have turned heads for their skyrocketing traffic and massive appeal among young people, who flock to the sites by the millions to bond via photos, videos, blogs, email and instant messaging. Meanwhile, top portals MSN and Yahoo, threatened by the prospect of losing favoured-site ranking to MySpace, have begun to organise their applications around social networking as well.
But Google's two-year-old social network Orkut — which connects friends and friends of friends around shared interests, but does not include blogging or video features — has lagged in the popularity contest. It's still not widely available and has yet to adopt the Google brand. "It proved to be a problem for Google so now they're watching it," said Stephen Arnold, author of "The Google Legacy," referring to accusations that Orkut members promoted gang-related violence in countries such as Brazil.
But as Google takes time to tinker with another one of its many young services, competitors are fast encroaching on the company's other turf.
Blogger, for example, was the Web's top blog-publishing tool when Google bought it in February 2003. Although Google hasn't turned the service into a full-on social network, Nielsen/NetRatings considers blogging a social activity.
In the last year, MySpace, which lets members include blogs on their personal pages, surpassed Google's Blogger as the top social-networking site by Nielsen's measure in the US. In May 2006, Blogger had 20 million unique visitors, up 67 percent from May 2005. In contrast, MySpace drew 42 million unique visitors in May, up 329 percent from the same period a year ago, according to Nielsen.
Orkut fell below Nielsen's reporting cut-off at roughly 300,000 unique visitors.
According to Google, the company is "committed" to social networking through Blogger, Google Video and Orkut. "Where it makes sense, Google continues to integrate its products to provide the best user-experience possible, as with Gmail and Google Talk, for example," according to an unnamed spokesperson.
Of course, some proponents say Google is savvy not to invest heavily in services that have questionable benefit to its search and advertising business, which is worth near $6bn annually. What's more likely, they say, is that Google will invest in technologies that can improve Web search and its rate of return on advertising "clicks".
"Fundamentally, information, not people, is Google's forte," said Esther Dyson, editor of tech newsletter Release 1.0, which is owned by CNET Networks, publisher of ZDNet UK. "It will be interesting over time to see how close Google can come to understanding people through algorithms," she added.
The rival advantage
Onlookers have doubted the staying power of social networks such as MySpace, calling them fads. But efforts to get into social networking by portals Microsoft and Yahoo show that the social services can resonate with Web surfers and prove beneficial to display and search-related advertising.
Microsoft, for example, is using social networking to gain a tactical advantage over rival Google.
Moz Hussain, Microsoft group product manager at MSN Spaces, said that by incorporating social features into its blog publishing tool MSN Spaces, the company is driving consumer loyalty and ad revenue.
MSN Spaces, which was launched in December 2004, has become the most popular social network on a global basis, according to ComScore Networks. That's a fact the software giant attributes to the social-networking features, inserted last year, that alert people to changes within friends' blogs via MSN instant messenger.
"The obvious way you make money is by generating a large number of page views and (displaying) ads against those pages," Hussain said. But he added: "If people use two of our products, they become much more valuable and use all our products more."
The result has meant more display and search-related advertising, he said.
In the next month or two, Hussain said the company will infuse more networking features into MSN Spaces and its social-network brand, Windows Live Spaces. With the tool, people will be able to see lists of friends on their blogs or IM windows, and then, via an upcoming product called "Friends Explorer," use the cursor to peruse friends of friends.
Arnold, the author, said social software is ultimately a shortcut for MSN in the search race because it provides the software giant with easy markers for spidering the Web and producing relevant results.
Google introduced Orkut in January 2004 as the sideline project of one of its engineers, Orkut Buyukkokten. Like most of the company's new products, Google's Orkut enjoyed enormous buzz early on…
