Apparently Google’s new social platform is codenamed Maka-Maka. While it may sound ridiculous, according to one of the Techcrunch comments, “‘Maka’ in Hebrew means ‘a hit’ or ‘a punch.’ When you say a guy made a ‘maka’ in Israel, it means that he made a great deal and earned a lot of money, really fast.” Looks like Google is trying to prepare the Facebook knock out. It doesn’t look like Google is going to be ready by the rumored November 5th launch date though.

According to people that I’ve spoken with, the announcement will be made on November 1st and the actual launch of the platform will be on December 1st. For those that don’t realize the amount of technical innovation that had to take place in order to develop the Facebook platform, over 5 months later there is still no competitor and not even Google will have something for over a month.

After speaking with a number of developers from the Facebook platform, it sounds like many of the most popular applications on Facebook are now being approached to be launch partners with all the other social networks that are preparing competing platforms. Not a bad situation for those that are at the top of Facebook. These companies that currently have hundreds of thousands or millions of users are about to gain even greater exposure through competing platforms. Imagine finding out that your company which just doubled in the past 5 months is about to quadruple in the next 6 to 12 months. Not bad!

From the sound of things, Maka-Maka has a pretty good chance of taking on Facebook given that they are about to open up a lot of their services to the entire web rather than using Facebook’s walled garden approach. While nobody knows how the platform wars are about to pan out, one thing is for sure: the next 12 months are going to be exciting times!