Google Propeller to Launch as Flipboard & Facebook Competitor

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Google is ramping up its efforts in everything social, as with its new corporate thrust. Having launched Google+ earlier this year, the company is working on adding applications to further improve the user experience.

Google had reportedly been in talks to acquire several startups for their technology, such as Flipboard. The said service provides an app for mobile devices like the iPad, iPhone and Android devices that add a social aspect to content. It’s the “world’s first social magazine,” after all.

Google was reported to have attempted to acquire Flipboard last year, which was then valued at about $200 million. But Flipboard declined, and now Google on its way to developing something bigger. Sources cited by tech blogger Robert Scoble say that Google is working on a Flipboard competitor, which is intended for both iOS and Android platforms. “[T]he versions he’s seen so far are mind-blowing good,” Scoble says. According to industry insiders, the product Google is developing will eventually be called Propeller, and it will add a social aspect to a content reader, which will be similar to Flipboard, AOL Editions, Yahoo! Livestand and Zite (which was acquired by CNN).

Content curation is just one aspect of social media. But with the flood of information online, social recommendations are often the first place you would search content for. Take Twitter, Google+ and Facebook, for instance. In any given minute, millions of links are being shared and tweeted. But those from your trusted friends and sources are likely to be what interests you most, especially if you share the same interests as your circles. Google is planning to bank on this media-consumption habit, by integrating a social reader into its Google+ app, or perhaps even releasing Propeller as a standalone technology.