Kevin Rose may have started the rumors about Google Me, but they didn’t end there. New rumors have Google Me launching in 2010, possibly October.

I’m going to go ahead and start my own rumor — pure conjecture with no insight into the situation — my guess on what Google is building. Google Me will be a social network without a hub; a Facebook without a facebook.com. Essentially it will be a Like button that’s tied to your Gmail account and/or Google Profile that third-party sites will add to their social jewelry section.

This ties in with Google’s main focus, which is still search, and gives them a lot of new data they can use to increase accuracy of that focus — the more you use this button the more Google can tailor searches to your actual needs, wants and likes.

Whether I’m right or wrong, Mashable sums up the whole situation by saying, “What makes the project really interesting is that Google cannot afford to fail on this one; if it does, it will only strengthen Facebook as the number one social network out there.”

And speaking of Kevin Rose, Digg just got a lot more social, personal and automatic:

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The live launch of Caffeine, Google’s new new web indexing system has been announced. 

So what does this mean for the owners of web content and SEO copywriters? Not much. The game is the same, it just got much faster. There will just be more competition for those ever valuable top 10 spots though.

Users searching for breaking news or live events, however, will get much more relevant links towards the top of their Google search. Mike Cutts, the Google guru who made the announcement, said, “Fundamentally the change is as soon as a document gets crawled, boom, it gets indexed. This essentially makes the entire index closer to real time.”

As for social media: when asked if “you could now, for example, look at Facebook’s open social graph or whatever it’s called, see all the Likes for a particular page and associate those Likes with that page,” Cutts replied, “If that page were public, then you could.” Which, if I’m hearing things correctly is Google saying, “Thanks for all the data Facebook, this is going to really help with our indexing.”

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Clickjacking is a word you should get used to hearing. In it’s current context, it’s unscrupulous website owners misusing the Like button and gaming the Facebook system. It’s also why Facebook won’t defeat Google/search in the battle for web supremacy anytime soon. When users can’t trust the links, things and places their friends are liking then the entire system falls apart.

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We’ll have to wait till E3 to know for sure, but rumor has it Hulu is coming to Xbox Live. There are a couple of interesting implications that come to mind:

• Xbox is a social media machine — already having full integration into Twitter and Facebook — adding a Like button and/or @anywhere tag to the opening and closing credits of episodes should be a no-brainer.
• There’s a real possibility to have Hulu parties (much like Xbox’s current Netflix party feature). You could watch the season finale of Lost with all of your friends without ever leaving your house.
• Microsoft will probably find out that subscription fees don’t work — anyone who can hook up an Xbox to their TV can hook up a computer to their TV and stream Hulu for free. This would mean commercial integration into Hulu shows, which could lead to some really groundbreaking commercials. I’m thinking a game/commercial hybrid. These people already have an Xbox controler in their hands, why not take advantage of that?

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Openbook lets you tap into a ridiculous amount of Facebook updates and profiles. With a simple search function (and some funny suggested searches) takes everything you don’t want people to know, yet post on Facebook, and collects it into one spot. If nothing else, it shows that a lot of people don’t know how to change their Facebook privacy settings.

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Define your ROI, have a business objective, empower your employees and personalize your brand. This is the advice of some pretty heavy hitters in the social media world: Virgin America, Comcast and Cisco.

They also hand out some advice and insight on how social media will probably change your company internally.

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Elliot Schrage, the current VP of public policy at Facebook and former Google exec, was recently grilled by NYT readers. One their main concerns was privacy. In response Schrage says:

It’s clear that despite our efforts, we are not doing a good enough job communicating the changes that we’re making. Even worse, our extensive efforts to provide users greater control over what and how they share appear to be too confusing for some of our more than 400 million users. That’s not acceptable or sustainable. But it’s certainly fixable.

It sounds like Schrage might be bringing some of the “Don’t be evil.” mentality to Facebook. Either that or he sees the writing on the wall.

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Are tweets (and other social media posts) the voice of the people?

I’m not going to jump into the beehive that is arguing the accuracy, or inaccuracy, of a tool like Healthcare NTI, which is billed as “the first social media tracking tool to monitor public opinions on healthcare.” But I will be interested to see if social media tracking tools are sold to and used by politicians. Will their knowledge of their constituency be based on Facebook posts?

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Recently, Facebook has been eating all of Google’s ice cream. And Google knows it. So their on the hunt for a new Head of Social.

The job description shows that Google is well aware of this position.

From the recruiting letter:

This is a new and very strategic position, as Google knows it is late on this front and is appropriately humble about it. In Google’s view, conceptually, there are two ways to tackle social, each impacting who may be successful in this senior post: 1) building an innovative offering specifically in this area; or 2) developing the capability and integrating social into Google’s existing portfolio.

As they say, knowing is half the battle.

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