When Bindu Reddy, one half of the two member team behind the just launched Likaholix (a recommendation engine and social platform for likes) reached out to us about her new initiative, we were intrigued by the fact that her and her partner are two ex-Googlers who seem to be heading down the same path as many other ex-Googlers: launching social software of some kind.

We've certainly noticed that former Google employees tend to attach themselves to overly social products like FriendFeed and Plinky. With this in mind, we asked Reddy to elaborate on this growing trend and talk about the motivations behind Likaholix.

Why Googlers Are Leaving

So, why are Googlers leaving the search behemoth? For one, growing pains in community building initiatives. Reddy believes that "Google product managers are top class and have great innovative ideas for community sites and they are a bit frustrated that they can't realize their vision in Google, which is why a lot of them quit to follow their dreams."

In her opinion, the reason former Googlers focus on community-oriented is because they, "know that it is very difficult to take on Google on a pure technology play," and, "when it comes to community based sites, Google doesn't do all that well. Google's infrastructure, most of it built in-house, makes it really difficult to iterate rapidly. Google Video, a product that I worked on comes to mind. Part of the reason Google Video failed miserably against You Tube was that the team couldn't iterate rapidly and build some of the community and upload features as rapidly as they wanted. Youtube, at that time a small start-up was able to build and release a lot of features quickly."

Infrastructure Works For and Against Google

According to Reddy, "Most Google infrastructure is based on the original search thinking that scaling is done by using lots of cheap hardware using software layers to protect against machine failures. While this works really well for certain problem classes, there is a "scalability and complexity tax" which most new services pay in terms of development speed, even though they don't need it in the initial phases."

The reason she sees more opportunity with Likaholix is because Google can't always leverage open source tools due to infrastructure limitations, where Likaholix can "leverage as many open source tools as possible," admitting that they "could not have made this much progress over the last 7 months or so in terms of product, UI and engineering if we were to build this at Google."

Reddy does admit, however, that Likaholix's less complex infrastructure is not poised to compete with Google's. "Google would never have any load/traffic issues. They are always built to scale. In contrast Likaholix has been slow when we have experienced high load/traffic today," she said.

When asked if Google should be worried about any one particular competitor in the social sphere, Reddy stated without hesitation — Facebook. "It is soon becoming the identity and communication platform for the web (people are beginning to spend more time here than on Google services)" and Twitter, which "s becoming the goto destination for real time search," she added.

From Google to Likaholix

Likaholix is a community-focused site that does one thing really well — likes. There's certainly an element of social awareness to Likaholix that you're not likely to find in most Google products. So even though Likaholix has the feel of a destination site, it's also creating logical extensions to onsite liking and commenting. Users can share their likes with Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed, import existing reviews from both Yelp and Amazon, as well as grab the bookmarklet for instant liking while browsing.

The site strays from FriendFeed by trying to focus on all things you like, instead of just news, to include people, activities, products, restaurants, and the like. The end game being users turning to Likaholix first when they searching for something to watch or buy, or some place to go.

Likaholix does have familiar elements of early stage Google beta products, so users can expect a spartan design (for the time being), and smart search functionality.

Reddy and Sundararajan are also replicating a Gmail (you need an invite to join at first) and Grand Central-like user growth strategy, so after our 200 invites are used up, you probably won't be able to access the site until you receive an invite from a friend. The idea being that users will take advantage of their 10 invites and the site will grow via word of mouth, and the focus will remain on sharing likes with real friends.

200 Mashable readers can get in before Likaholix shuts it doors to new users by signing up here.

See Also: 5 Startup Tips From the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed