• Red Herring, Tuesday, July 10, 2007 11 AM

Given the resurgence of Facebook and social networking, you may be wondering where Google stands on social media. YouTube is really the only social media site in the Web giant's vast catalog of services, but it's hardly a social network. But Google is creating a social networking technology -- and it heavily leverages the company's industry-leading search technology.

The prototype, called "Socialstream," is being developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Human Computer Interaction Institute, and has been billed as an aggregator service of social networks that interacts with and draws data from users' existing social networks.

"A service model allows many social networks to be linked together, letting them share both content and the nature of the relationships of the people who use them," the Socialstream Web site reads. How would social networks like MySpace feel about this? Not good, probably, but that hasn't stopped Google. As ever, the company believes that MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and others would willingly partner with such a "useful" service. It's classic Google to "reinvent and rethink" established services and worry about the consequences later.

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