Google will focus a lot on groups of friends and how you share with them, and try to differentiate themselves from Facebook in this and other ways.

Google doesn’t appear to want to have a big launch announcement around the product, now or down the road. They keep releasing (or dealing with leaks) new social features in drips and drabs: toolbar stuff, profile stuff, video stuff.

Facebook and Google have not been playing nice over the last two years, and sometime in the near future Google will be rolling out their Social Networking platform. What they are rolling out is supposed to challenge Facebook but at the same time work with their tools. Facebook & Google have been cutting off information & integration from each other over the past 18 months. I for one do not have a facebook account but there is no denying the affect of Facebook and how involved people are with its services, many businesses in Kuwait have become successful because of their pro-activeness on facebook. This does include how it has become an extremely successful tool during political unrest such as it was in Iran and Egypt. Now Google is planning to roll their service out without too much of a fuss, and I’m one looking forward to trying it out. To be fair I really don’t like Facebook and their policies, privacy is out the window, and they have a lot of shady third party software companies taking private information and selling or using it in an unauthorized way. When it comes to Google a lot of people have issues with it but I for one do trust Google since my email and other information is already with Google. I just hope they have really thought it out and it won’t be a flop like Google Wave, or have issues like Google Buzz. I hope it has all the integration options of Google but everything should be turned off initially so people can choose what they want to integrate.