Will Facebook Be Tomorrow’s Google, and Google Tomorrow’s Microsoft?, by Bindu Reddy, TechCrunch (May 15)
Bindu Reddy, ex-Google-employee, finds some chinks in the Google business armour, manly concerning product promotion. Facebook knows a lot about people and, she says, can do a better job of directing bits of interest to you - as well as ads (which is the point).
"Want to see pics of your cousin’s wedding? Want to know what movies your co-workers are watching this weekend? What music your friends “like”? You need to go to Facebook. The bottom line is that you are now trained to go to Facebook to discover things. With the growth of the Facebook app platform and support (so far) from apps like Farmville and Mafia Wars, Facebook has also grown into the number one destination on the web for entertainment and spending time."
I am not so enamoured with Facebook, but it could be the company I keep. If your friends are there, you have to be too.
Google may not be as adept at delivering relevant ads.
"Google’s ad business models are based on intent and relevance and not on discovery. The performance based AdWords and AdSense models are easier to measure and appeals to the logical / analytical minds at Google. The power of influence, discovery and brand advertising needs more right-brain thinking than Google’s left brainers are used to."
I might have ignored this article had it not received a recommendation from the very astute Stephen Arnold - Sharper Than the Tooth of a Serpent, A Xoogler Analysis of Google
Arnold says more in an earlier posting - Social Networks, Testosterone, and Facebook (May 13)
He writes of the advantage of searching social networks over the wide web - networks such as delicious, and stumbleupon - to get fewer, but relevant and more recent results. Facebook is the biggest - a Google of the social scene - and has the power to disrupt search.
"To sum up, Facebook has some real potential to disrupt Web search with its social methods. The company can index Web sites its 400 million members say are important. Within Facebook, it might be easier to ask friends and then run a query across Web sites Facebook members “like”. Is this objective search? Not in a million years. But that’s not the point. The impact is that search traffic bleeds from some vendors and flows to Facebook. That cost advantage may be trivial right now, but going forward it may become a larger factor. That’s the point in my Information Today column. Also, the testosterone factor is important. Facebook is what Google was. I know this makes me giggle, but your reaction may be different. Instead of being Googled, now a company can be Facebooked. New verb."
Posted by Gwen at May 17, 2010 03:25 PM