Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has put the company on “lockdown” for 60 days in preparation for a coming war with Google.

The reason: Google will launch a social network called Google Me sometime between tomorrow and the end of the year, according to a very widely accepted but unconfirmed rumor. The company is also buying up companies to fortify itself for the launch.

But why would a search engine company want to dominate social networking? The answer is that Google isn’t a search engine company. Google is in the advertising business. It attracts users by offering a wide variety of free services. Google then uses those services to harvest information about users, which it can then leverage to sell more advertising at higher prices.

Facebook is in the exact same business. Facebook offers its free social network, and uses the activity of users to gain insight that helps them sell more and better ads.

Facebook has more than 500 million users, and is growing fast. According to some reports, Facebook sends more traffic to some types of Web sites than Google does. This no doubt threatens Google’s intent to dominate the future of online advertising.

To fight back, Google has recently acquired a game-oriented virtual currency company called Jambool, a social gaming company called Zynga and a social networking applications company called Slide. Google had previously acquired the microblogging service Jaiku.

Google has already tried and failed in three ways to create a social network that can compete with Facebook. First, Google launched its social network, called Orkut. While the service became a hit in Brazil, and gained many users in India, the rest of the world responded to Orkut with an underwhelming “meh!”

Read more about Facebook in Lockdown – Preparing for Google Me?

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