According to The Wall Street Journal, Google will announce later this week a new Gmail feature that allows users to post ongoing streams of status updates while using the web-based e-mail service. A source told the Journal that Google will eventually seek to allow users to stream other Google services like YouTube videos and Picasa photos.

Twitter in Gmail?

In the short term, it's unlikely that having status updates in Gmail would cause much of a ripple at Facebook, which is a full-blown ecosystem of friends, advertising, third-party apps, groups and more.

The new feature sounds closer to Twitter, which is purely a status update service. There may be more room for Google to make some inroads there. A recent survey by RJMetrics found that the formerly torrid pace of new Twitter accounts has slowed to about 20 percent below the peak hit last July. These days, about 6.2 million new accounts are created every month.

But, it turns out, many of those accounts are vapor. Twenty-five percent of all Twitter accounts have no followers and 40 percent have never tweeted. "About 80 percent of all Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times," and "Only about 17 percent of registered Twitter accounts sent a Tweet in December 2009, an all-time-low," RJMetrics reported.

Not a Killer App

Twitter seems vulnerable to Google, while Facebook does not, exactly because tweets just go into the either while Facebook posts go to a (sometimes very broad) circle of friends. Just as interest in blogging has started to fall, according to a Pew Research Center study, Facebook participation continues to rise.

Will social networking in Gmail make a difference? In the short term, no, said Greg Sterling, principal analyst with Sterling Market Research, in a telephone interview. "To some degree, e-mail contacts are a social network, and social media is an area where Google has so far been fairly weak," Sterling said. "It may add some utility to Gmail, but it's not going to be a Facebook- or Twitter-killer."

In the long term, Google clearly would like to have a major presence in social networking. It's a point CEO Eric Schmidt made when announcing the purchase of YouTube. But Google has so far failed to exploit the social nature of YouTube, its Orkit social network has been a bust, its Picasa photo-sharing site is largely off the radar, and, looking back in history, Blogger -- acquired from the team that would go on to create Twitter -- has been a missed opportunity.

Given that history, "I don't think they'll develop a Facebook-like social network," Sterling said. "Google's products reflect its engineering culture; they have a machine quality. Facebook has pictures of people and conversations." Given the cultural differences, social networking and Google may never be a good fit.

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