Kevin Rose may have started the rumors about Google Me, but they didn't end there. New rumors have Google Me launching in 2010, possibly October.

I'm going to go ahead and start my own rumor — pure conjecture with no insight into the situation — my guess on what Google is building. Google Me will be a social network without a hub; a Facebook without a facebook.com. Essentially it will be a Like button that's tied to your Gmail account and/or Google Profile that third-party sites will add to their social jewelry section.

This ties in with Google's main focus, which is still search, and gives them a lot of new data they can use to increase accuracy of that focus — the more you use this button the more Google can tailor searches to your actual needs, wants and likes.

Whether I'm right or wrong, Mashable sums up the whole situation by saying, "What makes the project really interesting is that Google cannot afford to fail on this one; if it does, it will only strengthen Facebook as the number one social network out there."

And speaking of Kevin Rose, Digg just got a lot more social, personal and automatic:

Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, has been posting some interesting tweets, specifically that Google is building their own social network. At this point most people assume it's going to be an expansion of Google Profiles, including PCMag, who said:

It appears that Google Me could fly in as an upgrade to the preexisting Google Profiles service that, itself, is almost like a mini-biographical profile page. However, its unclear as to just how Google's other user information feeds — Buzz, Wave and even the company's experience with the social networking site, Orkut — would tie into the grand picture.

Adding a fuel to the fire is the fact that Rick Klau, the developer who built Google Buzz, was recently tapped to overhaul Google Profiles.

True or not, the battle between Facebook and Google rages on.

Google Caffeine has been out long enough that people are starting to figure out how it works and have started coming up with best practices. This article is worth reading in its entirety if you're working on making it to the top of the search pile, but I'll sum up the main points:

• Keep your content fresh and constantly updated — have a blog or news feed on your site
• Use social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious
• Participate in forums and link back to your site on them
• Incorporate social media plug-ins
• Encourage discussion on your site — every new comment is seen at fresh content by Google spiders

"We design for ourselves first." -Jason Fried, 37signals

This is probably truer than any of us would like to admit. But if you're trying to attract as many users as possible, you need to design like a populist.

In their "Designing for the First Fifteen Minutes" SXSWi panel, Daniel Burka (Digg, Glitch) and Rob Goodlatte (Facebook) explained how this approach applies to social media design and beyond:

• Be empathetic. Design for new users, not just yourself.
• Hook 'em. Get your users invested before you propose something new.
• Get them invested. Help people make something they'd hate to lose.
• Provide a treasure map. Let them know that what's "over the wall" is worth doing.
• Deliver the "aha" moment. Make connections with your users by delighting them
• Get users to help you. Build feedback cycles into the user experience (for Facebook, sharing is the "galactic" feedback cycle)
• Make education an experience. Make learning fun so people will want to learn and become experts (ex.Yammer's to do lists)
• Don't overthink things. Keep your designs simple.

Want the whole presentation? Check http://www.slideshare.net/dburka in a little while.

Digg.com co-founder, Kevin Rose, has some suggestions for Google Buzz. Can't say we disagree.

You may not know it yet, but Gits are a key part of your social media experience. Across platforms, a number of high-profile projects — Android, Digg, jQuery, Ruby on Rails...the list goes on — use Gits for revision control.

Now there's a community designed to make it easy for coders to collaborate on Git repositories efficiently and effectively. Part of a freemium social coding service called GitHub (they host heavy-hitters like Facebook, Yahoo and TechCrunch), Gist is a simple way to share snippets and pastes with other developers.

Get the idea? Check out the GitHub blog for more on how social coders roll.

Part Digg for mobile apps and part community forum, Appify is a collaborative space where local apps, users and developers work together to improve the mobile experience.