Google and Facebook: the battle for geolocation

The timing policy for launching Google products can be called original, but they are rarely random. The day after Facebook introduced its geolocation service to the world, the search giant announced in its blog that 100 million people around the world use Google Maps on their mobile devices.

The author of the message was Vic Gundotra (Vic Gundotra) - the head of the mobile division of Google, and in the past a key figure in this direction of the company. He is currently working on the Google Me project, with which Google is going to fight Facebook in the field of social networks.

Why did Gundotra return to his mobile past? One possible explanation for this fact: Google sees the mobile direction as one of the key areas in which you can quickly catch up with Facebook, and Google Maps is one of the most important and popular Google mobile applications.

Gundotra went to “step on the heels” of the new Facebook service, with the help of which users can announce the location of themselves and their friends to other users of the service. Facebook showed its Places service to journalists last week, and later announced that the number of users from America had already exceeded 125 million.
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In his blog post on the # 1 search engine, Vick talked about some of the popular features of Google Maps, such as My Location, which allows users to track their position in space even on phones without navigation functions and the GPS module. It added the functions of voice prompts and street photos, which allows you to turn a regular mobile phone into a full-fledged navigation device.

Gundotra specifically mentioned, often away from the core, the Latitude function used today by Android users to share location information and track the movement of their friends, and Place Page, which appeared last year, to host a layer of metadata, such as reviews and photos of each object you visit. These two functions are essentially the same as Facebook Places.

The only thing missing in Google services is people. Facebook Places allows users to share information about places with friends, keep track of whether someone is visiting the same places as you, etc. features that Google does not yet have. The social component, and not just the provision of information in the field, are Facebook's main trump cards, which is not surprising, since Google has always focused on technology and data processing, and Facebook has been working on the interaction between people.

I wonder if the blog’s # 1 blog post just serves as a reminder that Google is alive, well and continues to work in geolocation, or is it a hint of something more? And does Gundotra know well what is missing on the social map of Google?

by venture beat