Google is reportedly drawing up a “celebrity acquisition plan” to help publicise its new Google+ social network to become well-known by prominent actors, musicians and other public figures,CNN has revealed. CNN learned of Google’s plans for its three-week-old social network via a number of emails from Google, which highlights a new system to verify the identity of a public figure when they sign up for the service. The system would operate similarly to the way Twitter authenticates celebrities on its service, with Google reported to be pondering the inclusion of a button that would be present on legitimate profiles....

We have all heard, by now, that one of the new features ofChrome 11is the ability to use voice commands. While users of Android devices have seen this for quite some time, doing it from the desktop is a completely different story. According toSEO Roundtable, it seems that Google is testing its first implementation of the speech-to-text ability with a “Speak Now” search option on Google.com searches. Roundtable’s extremely credible Barry Schwartz brings up the obvious questions, but then knocks them right down:...

Google is reportedly about to be served with civil subpoenas by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which is expected to kick-start a broad antitrust investigation looking at whether the search engine giant has been abusing its dominance across the Web. Thereportin today’s Wall Street Journal indicates that the FTC is about to send Google formal demands for information within a few days. This also means that other companies will likely receive official requests for information relating to their dealings with Google further down the line....

Rumours began last summer that Google wasgearing upto take on Facebook with a big social product codenamed “Google Me” (Tech site RWW has established the name of the product to beGoogle Circles). While no such fully formed product has emerged since, we’ve heard word today that it’s scheduled to launch at this year’s I/O developers’ conference on 10 and 11 May. While Google CEO Eric Schmidtsuggestedin September last year that a ‘social layer’ was coming to all the company’s products, it’s yet to materialise....

Despite reports to the contrary, Google will not launch a new social networking platform called Google Circles at SXSW today, further suggesting that the search giant will launch what we have previously referred to as Google Me in May. A report byReadWriteWebsuggested that Google Circles will offer photo, video and message sharing, with the service sharing content with only the “most appropriate of social contacts in their lives, not with all contacts in bulk”....