Google’s effort to dent Facebook’s domination of social media has a face, according to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, and it’s a fellow named Vic Gundotra. According to Arrington’s sources, Gundotra has “product control of Google’s social thrust,” which means he’ll be running, among other things, Google.Me, a service that is expected to be some version of Facebook that takes advantage of the fact that everyone already uses Google constantly.

Arrington, who went a little bananas with the Google vs. Facebook World War II metaphors in his post, does not hold back when it comes to the stakes here: in his view, if Mr. Gundotra fails to build Google a robust social network component, the company will “give control over the way the web is organized, and monetized for the next decade or so.”

Background on Google.Me here.

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