Google's Eric Schmidt would love integration among Google+, Facebook, Twitter
Google believes that there is enough room in people's lives for multiple social networks -- Google+ in addition to Facebook and Twitter, Eric Schmidt, the company's executive chairman, told Reuters.
In fact, Google would someday like to see a bit of integration among its Google+ network and those it's hoping to challenge for a person's social time online, Schmidt said while speaking to reporters at the Allen & Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on Thursday.
Google+, which launched last week, is still too new to declare it a hit or failure, Schmidt said, according to Reuters. But, although Google+ is still in a testing period with a limited number of users, which Google has been increasing sporadically, the large number of people who want into the new network is one early indicator of success, he said.
Hangouts, Google+'s group video chat feature with which a user's friends can jump into a chat session of up to 10 people on the fly, is among the more popular features used on the new social network so far, particularly with younger users, he told reporters.
Schmidt also said that Google approached Facebook about making it easy for users to import contacts from Facebook's network into Google+, but those talks "went nowhere," Reuters said.
Google and Twitter recently stopped working together to bring real-time results from Twitter into search results because the two companies couldn't come to terms on a new partnership deal in spite of "a substantive and lengthy discussion," Schmidt told Reuters.
But irregardless of those two recent failures at working with what are arguably the top two players in social networking, Google would still "love to have deeper integration with Twitter and Facebook," he said.
Facebook is currently the world's most popular social network, with more than 750 million users. Google+, only about a week old, likely has tens of thousands of users so far and thus quite a lot of ground to make up on the popularity side it if hopes to compete with Facebook.
Schmidt, who stepped aside as Google's CEO in April to make way for company co-founder Larry Page, has said in the past that under his watch the search giant missed opportunities to make headway in social networking earlier on -- and it also missed out on working with Facebook.
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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Photo: Eric Schmidt speaks during Google's Chrome event in San Francisco on Dec. 7, 2010. Credit: Beck Diefenbach / Reuters
