Google Me: Have We Been Using It All Along?

The rampant speculation around esoteric social platform Google Me is dominated by talk of Google's numerous failed forays into the territory.

Much of the skepticism is a result of a reasonable expectation that Google is building a destination site, one that could house games and messaging, formatted the way current counterparts are. But what if that's not the plan? What if Eric Schmidt's now infamous quote about not needing another Facebook meant that there is no destination site in the works? What would that even look like?

My guess is that there will be no big announcement, no shiny new product, and no sleek mobile app. I'd venture to say Google is about 20 steps ahead of us, putting the pieces for their platform in place, one product at a time.

Facebook's defining quality, embodied by the ubiquitous "like" button, is to forge connections between people, content and, ultimately, Facebook.com. Google has instead focused on mastering the art of singular products, some of which are organically social and some of which are not. From Maps and Places to YouTube and Gmail, the services are all-encompassing but not contained in a one-size-fits-all destination site. While Facebook operates on a platform-first model, forced to fit new features within an existing framework, Google is essentially a suite of pure features; what's missing is the glue that holds them all together -- integration and a fluid user interface.

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