• Inside Facebook et al., Tuesday, June 29, 2010 2:16 PM

Never one to shy away from a fight, Google is presently hard at work on "a full, first-class" Facebook killer, reports Inside Facebook, citing various sourcing, including early Facebook exec and chief technology officer Adam D'Angelo.

"This is a real project. There are a large number of people working on it," according to Inside Facebook. Google, it reports, "realized that Buzz wasn't enough and that they need to build out a full, first-class social network. They are modeling it off of Facebook ... Unlike previous attempts (before Buzz at least), this is a high-priority project within Google."

As Search Engine Land notes, it was actually Digg's Kevin Rose who got the rumor mill churning when he tweeted over the weekend that Google was working on a Facebook competitor, which is supposedly is being called "Google Me."

Inside Facebook suggests that Google has been completely caught off guard by the unfettered success of Facebook -- speculation that leads Fast Company to believe that the search giant just doesn't get what makes social so special.

"By the very nature of social networking it's a phenomenon that tends to grow virally -- the more people on Facebook, the more people get attracted to Facebook since more of their friends are already there: For Google's team to not understand this is surprising (and possibly explains the weak success of Google Buzz)," Fast Company writes. "There's also a hint in here that Google's management doesn't have a good grip on how people are interacting socially on the Web, and that they underestimated how people liked the friendly interactivity offered by Facebook."

As rattled as Google might be over Facebook's success, "Currently Facebook is not a 'threat' to Google as a search engine," assured Search Engine Land's Greg Sterling. "Only with a radical overhaul could [sic] search on Facebook start to peel away usage from Google. I'm not saying that's not hypothetically possible. But it doesn't really look probable for the foreseeable future at least."

"This obviously has the potential to be huge, and Facebook needs a strong competitor," writes TechCrunch. "But even if Google has an amazing site in the pipeline, creating the next Facebook is going to be easier said than done -- nearly 500 million people already have their content stored on Facebook, and despite what Facebook has claimed about being open, I doubt they'll make it easy for anyone to jump into the arms of a competitor."

"Frankly, it would be more surprising if Google didn't soon create a common platform for all of these social networks," suggests Fortune. "The only thing Google doesn't have is organization between its groups to give this one consistrant [sic] look and feel."

Read the whole story at Inside Facebook et al. »