It does, both literally and figuratively - the word means “friend” in Hawaiian. If you haven’t come across this already, it’s code name for Google project that aims to embed social fabric into all their current offerings including Orkut, Gmail and Google talk. It’s a big plan to go one-up on Facebook, and no one seems to be in a better position to do this than Google given their presence throughout the web (and not just one website, as in case of Facebook).

Techcrunch reported that they are going to unveil it in stages, and that the first release may happen as soon as within a week! What’s significant about this approach is that Google is trying to leverage entire web as a platform for social networking, and not limiting it to Orkut, their own social networking site. So in effect, they are trying to make it Most-of-Web vs. Facebook instead of Orkut vs. Facebook!

What makes this all the more interesting is Google’s initiative to bring common set of standards to the applications/widgets development - have a look at this New York Times article. They plan to expose their social graph data using standard set of APIs, and at this stage it seems they may provide the ability to both read and update the data which is different from what we have seen so far with Facebook! This will have immediate effect on applications deployed on iGoogle and Orkut (when they open this to developers), however it’s very easy to see that one of the motives behind this is to put pressure on Facebook since their development platform is based on Facebook specific APIs.

Let’s wait and watch what Google comes out with over the next few days/weeks. The social-networking arena is not going to cool off anytime soon!