We continue to hear about Facebook's 700 million users, on the way to a billion worldwide. According to comScore Google is already there, at least looking across all its websites. Google: The Biggest Network Of Sites The chart below, provided to us from comScore, shows the number of unique visitors that went to each company's network of web sites over the past year: comScore gets its data from a global panel of roughly two million internet users from which it extrapolates findings to the entire online population. This sampling methodology has been much criticized but remains the stand [...]

Related Topics: Google: General | Google: Orkut | Google: Outside US | Stats: comScore | Stats: General | Stats: Size | Top News

There's lots of buzzing and posting this morning based on a couple of tweets from Tim O'Reilly and Steve Case. They state that "Google Circles" (which is "awesome") is going to launch "possibly today." (See updates below.) ReadWriteWeb has a lengthy discussion of the reportedly impending product launch. It's based largely on hearsay but here are the main bullets from that post: The service will offer photo, video and status message sharing Everything shared on Circles is shared "only with the most appropriate circle of social contacts in their lives, not with all your contacts [...]

Related Topics: Google: Buzz | Google: General | Google: Orkut | Google: Social Search

The subject of "Google Me" has been discussed and debated and picked apart at length already. It's already tired and the "product" hasn't even launched. A new round of rumor and speculation has emerged from Quora (and TechCrunch). The supposed internal-testing name for Google Me was reported to be "Emerald City" but is now actually, supposedly, "Emerald Sea." But wait, it could also be called "Google + 1" and be a toolbar or browser extension that will try and duplicate the function of Facebook's Like. It's a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma -- or rather that was Russia. H [...]

Related Topics: Google: General | Google: Labs | Google: Orkut | Google: Partnerships | Google: Social Search

Last week Google acquired Angstro. The site has been described as a way to discover and organize information about individuals across various professional networks. Here's how Angstro describes itself: Ångströ represents the ability to hone in on highly focused, relevant news across professional networks. Where search engines such as Google and other news aggregator services have immense infrastructures that return a huge array of random results, Ångströ analyses a wide breadth of information from multiple data sources to deliver very few, yet very intelligent results. The pundit co [...]

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Based on unnamed "sources," yesterday TechCrunch reported that Google had "secretly" invested more than $100 million in social gaming platform Zynga and is launching "Google Games," built partly on Zynga. Let's establish all the usual qualifiers; this is an unconfirmed story and so on. And there are plenty of times when these TechCrunch-surfaced rumors turn out to be wrong. But this one seems to be supported by a job posting ("Product Management Leader, Games – Mountain View"). Given that, here are the main elements of the TechCrunch story beyond the headline itself: The Google inv [...]

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