It’s Official Now…Meet The New Face of Google+: Kevin Rose

In what was widely reported yesterday, Digg and Milk founder, and creator of the famed web-series Diggnation, Kevin Rose, has joined the Google. Today, in an aptly-placed post on Google+, Mr. Rose officially confirmed it, along with Bradley Horowitz. Although his post on Google+ may be a clear sign or indication that he’s gone 100% over with Google, it should be nothing more than a coincidence. Many months ago, Mr. Rose was one of probably a few people who shed services like Tumblr, Posterous, and WordPress in place of having Google+ be their official blog where people could respond and interact with him.

Nevertheless, it’s the place where Mr. Rose chose to make this announcement, but yet still hasn’t quite divulged what he’ll be doing with the search engine giant. But what he does share is that several of the Milk team will be going over to help build something in Mountain View. Along with himself, Google is acquiring Milk’s other co-founder, Daniel Burka, and their business development guy Chris Hutchins, who might also be known as the founder of LaidOffCamp.

Amid some speculation about what Mr. Rose and the Milk team will be doing, one thing that seems to be clear is that Google intends to put them to work to help build out their social efforts. Right now, there is YouTube and Google+ as probably the search engine’s only social components. YouTube is pretty self-sustaining and doesn’t really need any help, but Google+ on the other hand, needs a big boost. ComScore is reporting that while the social network had a decent boost in its hey day, the recent stats show that visitors only spend an average of 3 minutes within the month of January. Google needs to find a way to get people to stay longer on the site and hopefully Mr. Rose and the team will find a way to make that happen. His extensive experience in creating a service like Oink, Digg, and even Diggnation, should come in handy to help build a more thorough and scalable product line that people will clamor over each other to use, but that depends on how much leverage and freedom he’ll have.

Still no word yet on what will happen to Milk and the rest of the team.

Photo Credit: Kevin Rose at Diggnation during SXSW with Leo Laporte on stage, right before he crowdsurfed via Paul Stamatiou