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More details are emerging that point to Google launching a social media website, called Google Me, to rival Facebook as it emerges the web giant is looking for web users to take part in a “usability study”.

According to Techcrunch, Google is asking people to take a short survey to qualify for the study, which is taking place in Dublin with the likely hood that it is also conducting similar studies in other markets.

The study also suggests that Google has a working demo site of what could be Google Me (although that’s almost certainly a working name — good as it is) that it wants to let users loose on.

The questions focus around on and offline social networking looking at how people are making their connection days to day; their social habits (do they play sport, meet friends for drinks?); and which methods they use most frequently to communicate with friends and family..

Other questions ask which social networking sites users regularly visit from a list topped by Facebook followed by Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster and Orkut. It then asks about how many times they are accessing their “primary” social networking website (if they have one).

Another question asks about content habits and whether users have shared photos, video, reviews and blog posts.

The Google social networking site story kicked off at the tail end of June when Digg founder Kevin Rose tweeted that Google Me was a real project. This was followed by D’Angelo, the former Facebook’s CTO and founder of Q&A service Quora, who added more meat to the rumour when he posted that there were a large number of people at Google working on it.

Yesterday in a possibly related move Google invested as much as $200m in social gaming business Zynga. That expanded its social media footprint and possibly giving it access to a wealth of social media gaming for its planned site launch.

It is extremely exciting development and a necessary one. At the moment Facebook looks almost unassailable even with its tribulations around privacy. Those issues, and Facebook’s attitude to them, clearly make people uneasy, but there seems a widespread reluctance to leave it. I think part of that is ground in the idea that at the moment there is no widespread alternative to Facebook. Google could change that and offer a viable alternative and give Mark Zuckerberg and company a run for their money.