Google is reportedly planning to make Gmail more social by allowing
users to exchange status updates with friends and share Web content
links, features that moves Gmail into more direct competition with
Facebook.
News of the plan was revealed recently by The Wall Street
Journal.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
However, the company on Monday did invite journalists "to see some
innovations in two of our most popular products" at a media event
to be held Tuesday at the company's Mountain View, Calif.
headquarters.
After Google Search, Gmail is one of Google's most popular
products.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Gmail users will gain a
module that displays status updates from selected Google contacts,
a form of interaction popularized by Facebook and MySpace and also
embraced by Yahoo.
These status updates will eventually include content shared by
one's Google contacts through other Google properties, such as
YouTube and Picasa.
Facebook's walled-off form of social computing is seen as one of
the few forces that threatens Google's online advertising empire.
In response to that threat, Google has spent the past few years
adding social features to encourage social interaction among users
of its services.
In October, 2009, Google introduced a Social Search experiment,
a way to see what online friends have posted when the content is
relevant to a given search. Last month, Google promoted its Social
Search experiment from Google Labs to a beta product.