Hitwise took a look at Google recent announcement about its new social networking endeavors and how that partnership stack up against social networking giant Facebook. Adding together the heft of LinkedIn, Plazo, Friendster, and Hi5 (though there may be others added), Hitwise concluded Facebook is still ten times larger than Google’s OpenSocial architecture.
Now, that’s not to say Google isn’t going to widgetize everything to the point where it could become a portal in a sense for every social network a person belongs to. It’s clear most people belong to more than one social network and pulling those together with some sort or connective portal makes a lot of sense. In fact, several companies are already doing just that but none with the heft of Google.
Google mission is to organize the world’s information. Social networking has fostered an explosion of information ripe for the picking and monetization. Google isn’t going to miss out on this one.
