Google to take on Facebook on the 5th of November

Facebook's increasing popularity has forced Google to think towards it.Now Google is seeing Facebook like a threat and wants to counter the so called "Facebook Issue" impacting on its own business of social networking. As per Techcrunch, Google very recently held a highly confidential meeting at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View to discuss the company’s upcoming plans to address the “Facebook issue.”

So whats the startegy? Well Google plans to fight Facebook by being even more open than the Facebook Platform. If Facebook is 98% open, Google wants to be 100%. Well what would that mean? Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.

If the above statement actually happens, this could mean opening up of a whole new industry. you can build and host your own application and integrate Orkut data into your application.

In the long run, Google seems to be planning to add a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services, with Orkut as their initial main source of social graph information and, as I said above, possibly adding third party networks to the back end as well. Social networks would have little choice but to participate to get additional distribution and attention.

So What next... Wait for 5th of November.