Google Tackles Facebook in India With Hyper-Local Social Network -- Bloomberg

Still searching for a successful social segue

"The India push is part of Google’s aggressive global expansion. The company recently invested $550 million in Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com Inc. and a smaller amount in India’s Fynd, giving it an online shopping toehold in the world’s most populous nations. Now it’s fine-tuning social and messaging, where it has had limited success with Google+, Hangouts and Allo.

“General social networking is dominated by Facebook and peer-to-peer messaging by WhatsApp,” says Brandon Verblow, a New York-based analyst at Forrester Research. “However opportunities for local networking have not yet been fully exploited.”"

Google Tackles Facebook in India With Hyper-Local Social Network -- Bloomberg