Google is reportedly planning to make Gmail more social by allowing users to exchange status updates with friends and share Web content links, features that moves Gmail into more direct competition with Facebook.

News of the plan was revealed on Monday by The Wall Street Journal.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, the company on Monday did invite journalists “to see some innovations in two of our most popular products” at a media event to be held Tuesday at the company’s Mountain View, Calif. headquarters.

After Google Search, Gmail is one of Google’s most popular products.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Gmail users will gain a module that displays status updates from selected Google contacts, a form of interaction popularized by Facebook and MySpace and also embraced by Yahoo.

These status updates will eventually include content shared by one’s Google contacts through other Google properties, such as YouTube and Picasa.

Facebook’s walled-off form of social computing is seen as one of the few forces that threatens Google’s online advertising empire. In response to that threat, Google has spent the past few years adding social features to encourage social interaction among users of its services.

SOURCE: InformationWeek

The Internet giant wants to develop its smartphone technology to translate speech in real time.

The company would combine its advanced voice recognition know-how with its text translation service to create a mobile phone that acts as an instant interpreter.

Head of translation services Franz Och said: “We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years’ time.“Clearly, for it to work smoothly, you need a combination of high-accuracy machine translation and high-accuracy voice recognition, and that’s what we’re working on.”

‘Everyone has a different voice, accent and pitch,’ said Mr Och. ‘But recognition should be effective with mobile phones because by nature they are personal to you.’

Google has already created an automatic system for translating text on computers, which is being honed by scanning millions of multi-lingual websites and documents.

However Google admits speech will be an even tougher challenge than text but says a customer’s phone would adapt to its user by ‘learning’ their style of talking.

Source: The Times