Google confirmed as owner of Photovine.com. Looks like a new social app is on the way

We recently brought you news that Google had applied to trademark the name ‘Photovine’, seemingly as some kind of new social media service it had brewing behind the scenes. At the time there was also speculation that it had the domain name Photovine.com too. Now that’s been confirmed.

Fusible, ever watchful of such matters, has spotted that a DNS lookup for the domain now lists Google as the owner. That said, visit the domain, and you’ll be told in a nice big font: “Nothing to see here, move along”. You could be a little more polite about it, Google! google.com/photovine, meanwhile, leads to a standard Google 404 error.

So, what is Photovine likely to be? We’ve certainly heard no rumours about any forthcoming photo sharing service Google, so all we can go off is the trademark application. It covers the fields of ‘Computer software’, ‘Communications services’, ‘Non-downloadable computer software‘ and, most interestingly, ‘On-line social networking services‘. This would lead us to believe that whatever Google’s working on is a social service, with the ‘non-downloadable’ part hinting at a Web app – no big surprise for browser-loving Google.

Google’s record with launching and maintaining social services is poor. It had better be pulling something special out of the bag whenever it launches whatever Photovine turns out to be – something the public actually wants to use for longer than it takes the novelty to wear off.