Google Inc. is taking a swipe at Facebook Inc. with a new feature that makes it easier and faster for users of Gmail to view media and status updates shared by their friends.
Google could announce the new Gmail feature as soon as this week, said people familiar with the matter. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment.
The change will add a module that will display a stream of status updates from people that a Gmail user chooses to connect with, said one of these people—a format popularized by Facebook and Twitter Inc.
Yahoo Inc. added a similar feature to Yahoo Mail last year, allowing users to see whether their friends have uploaded a photo to a site like Flickr, for example, while looking at their email inbox.
Google, too, is trying to get users to turn to Gmail as place they can go to see what’s up with their friends, in addition to one they use to send and receive email. But whether Internet users will want to blend sending email with browsing friends’ content is unclear.
Google has been trying to fashion Gmail into more than an email service for years. The service currently lets users set an “away message,” which can be a link to a Web page, that their friends see when they instant-message them. Now, it plans to launch a new interface that will aggregate updates from more friends in a stream.
The new stream will also eventually include content that a user’s connections share through its YouTube video site and Picasa photo service, according to one person familiar with the matter. But whether those features will also be announced in the coming days remains unclear.
Google’s moves come as Facebook last week rolled out a new design with a shortcut to make it easier to view different types of messages. The social-networking company said last week it had roughly 400 million users. Gmail, the fastest growing of the major email services, had 176 million unique visitors in December, according to comScore Inc.
Source ~ The Wall Street Journal
Comments