Startup Chatter by Donna Bogatin

The purportedly do no evil Google enjoys warning the world about “hostile” intentions of purportedly evil empire Microsoft. In Google’s view of the Internet, which currently provides Google with monopoly-like profits, a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo is an affront to “the core” of Google’s Internet “culture,” i.e. business model.

Google rallies against a Microsoft-Yahoo combination, “the two companies operating the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet,” even while Google itself operates both the most heavily trafficked search engine on the Internet and the most heavily trafficked video portal on the Internet and thereby dominates two of the Web’s top three services.

The number one purveyor of Web search and video hopes to spur contemporary outrage over Microsoft’s “PC Software monopoly,” while it seeks at the same time, with minimal success, to displace Microsoft’s desktop applications leadership with its own Google-branded Web-based software. Google is also waging an uphill battle in trying to be a significant force in an area it ought to have easily dominated: Web-based social networking.

Google owned social network Orkut “is not very popular in the United States,” Jeff Levick, Google Director of Global Industry Development & Marketing, acknowledged this morning at the Advertising Research Foundation conference in New York City. Orkut is also apparently not very popular in Turkey: The top three Web traffic generators in that country are Google, Facebook and YouTube, Levick said. He then quipped, “Orkut is a Turkish name,” indicating a need for Google to do better marketing of Orkut against Facebook.

The Levick presentation was not as very Googley one, but a a generic overview of global social media opportunities to “leverage communities across the world.” While discussing how consumers are now producers and distributors of content, Levick showed a slide that included Google’s Open Social graphic, along with collaborators such as LinkedIn, Orkut and Hi5.

At the end of the panel, in lieu of audience Q & A, the audience was invited to ask questions directly of the panelists. I posed the following question to Levick, one I had prepared for the originally scheduled Q & A:

Google owns two of the top three sites in Turkey, but not Facebook. Rival Microsoft is a Facebook shareholder and business partner, while Facebook has not expressed any interest in working with Google’s Open Social. How is a Google strategy to facilitate leveraging communities across the world impacted if it does not have a working relationship with the hottest online community, Facebook?

Levick expressed pride in the Google-YouTube one-two punch in Turkey, but dismissed any concern over Facebook’s big Turkish connections, saying “what’s hot” varies by country. I noted, however, that Facebook is nevertheless the current hottest online social networking phenomenon from a global perspective.

Levick offered that a Facebook-free strategy does not impact Google because Google’s revenues have consistently been from advertising, ie., AdWords and AdSense. I pointed out that Google has committed $900 million to News Corp. to serve such advertising to Facebook’s arch rival MySpace, an arrangement that is not yielding sufficient monetization for Google.

I asked Levick if Google wants Facebook to work with OpenSocial. “OpenSocial is open to everyone,” is all Levick would say. Facebook has been more explicit, however, regarding its non-interest in socializing with the Google developed initiative :