The Google+ Project

Mark Zuckerberg Confirms 750 Million Users, Launches Video and Group Chat. At Facebook announcement, founder Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that the world's largest social network has grown even larger, to 750 million users. With so many users, Zuck said it's time to give them more to do on Facebook, so the company also unveiled two new features: group chat and video calls.

Google’s senior executives — long dismissive of the idea of importance of social to search — were contrite during their briefing earlier this week. “It is about time we have come to the realization,” said Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product with Google, “If you don’t know people, then you can’t organize the information for people.”

Google’s realization — however late – that it needs to use social, location and other signals to enhance its core search platform is welcome. “Google needs to understand these relationships and basically use those to make search better,” said Vic Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president for Social in an hour-long briefing earlier this week.