Alan O'Dea

Google is widely expected to soon announce a new social network service to compete with Facebook’s runaway growth. But CEO Eric Schmidt says Google’s social effort, widely rumored to be dubbed “Google Me,” won’t be a Facebook knock-off.

Instead, Schmidt has described Google’s evolving social strategy as more about using games and other social features to make existing products like search, Gmail, its Android smartphone operating system and its Chrome web browser better tuned to people’s relationships, and therefore, more popular.

“The world does not need another Facebook,” he told reporters at a recent tech conference. “It needs the technologies around friends and relationships to be allied to everything.”

With Facebook using games like Farmville and Mafia Wars to help push its membership beyond 500 million people, Google recently announced it is buying San Francisco-based Slide, a social entertainment company that created SuperPoke! and other popular applications on Facebook. Many observers believe Google is planning to use social games to lure users, just as Facebook used Zynga games like Farmville to attract millions of new adherents — speculation that grew stronger Friday as Google bought Jambool, a company that could serve as a global cash register for a Google social platform.

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