Google to challenge Facebook with 'social' Gmail

Posted by Leah McBride Mensching on February 8, 2010 at 5:53 PM

Google is preparing to announce new Gmail features that would extend its reach into the social networking realm, the Financial Times reported today, dubbing the plans a "Facebook assault." This following last week's news that Facebook is planning to launch an e-mail service.

The search giant is looking to give Gmail users a way to aggregate contacts' updates, which can currently be viewed in Google's Chat service, within Gmail's inbox. This would create a "stream of notifications that would echo the similar real-time streams from Facebook and Twitter."

The new feature could be announced as soon as this week, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The status update widget is a further push to turn Gmail into a "comprehensive communications hub" that Google hopes would keep users within Gmail, not Facebook, according to Wired.

The Wall Street Journal article stated that:

Google has been trying to fashion Gmail into more than an email service for years. It currently lets users set an "away message"--which can be a link to a Web site--that their friends see when they message them.

The new stream will eventually include content that a user's connections share through Google's YouTube video site and Picasa photo service, according to one person familiar with the matter. But whether those features will be announced in the coming days remains unclear.

Yahoo Mail, meanwhile, added a Twitter-like widget recently, but it has been mostly ignored, the Los Angeles Times Blogs pointed out.