The Battle Between Google and Facebook 202
A story at Wired delves into the ongoing struggle between Google and Facebook to establish their competing visions for the future of the internet. "For the last decade or so, the Web has been defined by Google's algorithms — rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will query this 'social graph' to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone to hire — rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google is now." A related article at ReadWriteWeb suggests that while Facebook's member base is enormous, the company hasn't taken advantage of its influence as well as it should have, though the capability for it to do so still exists.
Re:Well I for one (Score:4, Interesting)
Is facebook going down? (Score:2, Interesting)
The opinion of "the masses" isn't personal (Score:3, Interesting)
I have somewhere north of 300 friends on Facebook. Any question I might need help with would best be addressed to at most three of them. If I need to know something, I'm not going to find it out by asking my cousins. People I used to work with tend to know pretty much the same stuff I know in the field I used to work in. And so on. I haven't been able to enforce "you must be knowledgeable and a good thinker to know me" yet.
evil (Score:4, Interesting)
Just remember that Google still tries to not be evil. Facebook quite clearly has no such qualms about the standard sort of "corporate evil". Also Facebook invades your life infinite more than Google.
Re:Well I for one (Score:5, Interesting)
How do you discover new things through Facebook when it effectivly blanks out any information provided by anyone not in your "network"?
I think you are using a different interpretation of the word "new" than the GP. He is using the word to mean "new to me". So something can be known about by his friends, but it is new to him, so he learns about it. It looks like you are using the word to mean "brand spanking new" so that you and all of your friends would be clueless aobut it. Both points are valid.
That is one of my major complaints about Facebook. How am I supposed to know if I want to be "friends" with someone if their profile is hidden from me? And I can't view their profile unless I am friends with them.
The whole thing seems like a dick waving exercise for people who have a lot of IRL acquaintances (not necessarily people they are actually friends with). Seemingly the only way to become "friends" with someone on Facebook is to know them already.
That is precisely why I use Facebook instead of Myspace. People are almost required to have an IRL connection to the people on their friends list. This makes it a lot more likely that they know the individual personally, so it really is a "network" and not random people who like to have friends online. This also improves the likelihood that the person is a REAL PERSON, not a spam page. This is opposed to Myspace where people have 7000 friends that they never spoke to (the real dick waving exercise), and you have no idea who is really thier friend, or even if they are real people.
Yeah right (Score:3, Interesting)
Get back to me when Facebook gives a damn what I want. Always changing the layout because of this stupid concept of 'sharing' every fucking detail of our lives. Tell me on the right side of the homepage that I should friend my 60-year-old former diffusion professor. Forcing me to use their stupid minifeeds and asshole applications. You know why people consult Google for shit? Because Google gives them what they want. Facebook is just for dicking around and bending over while millions of drones come back and bend over for Mark Zuckerberg to come up with some new fucked up idea for changing the layout and pissing off the userbase again. Whereas Google will always be the same old Google, typically (not always, of course) well in touch with their userbase, providing what you need and far more powerful than Facebook. And above all, Google gives me the entire web, whereas Facebook just constrains me to this stupid social networking concept. Seriously, if the entire web became personal profiles and Facebook fan pages, I wouldn't bother paying for my connection anymore.
Google Wave and room for multiple visions (Score:3, Interesting)
Facebook's Vision? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, I, for one, am more comfortable with Google vision, which is not predicated on the idea of a single company having exclusive access to vast amounts of personal information.
By the way, it's easy to forget that what makes Google's "rigorous and efficient" algorithms work is that they model the work that all of the millions of people in the world do every day to build the web. When someone reads something online that they like, they create a new page and link to it. That is the powerful idea -- harnessing the work of real people -- that made Google work, and allowed it to supplant earlier search engines.
This is a false premise (Score:4, Interesting)
The whole genius of Google is that it is NOT "rigorous and efficient equations that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a dispassionate atlas of the online world". Search engines prior to Google would classify a searched for word or phrase by how many times it was mentioned in a page, if the word/phrase was in the page's title, or in the beginning of the page, perhaps in a header, and so forth. Google's algorithm was to do those rankings, but then to give enormous weight to what pages of that type linked to another page. So if a large majority of baseball web sites linked to the MLB's web site, MLB's website would be on top for a Google search for baseball (as indeed it is). This is not a dispassionate equation, but one utilizing human cognitive skills and social connections via the web to give you what you want. Google's surge over search engines like Opentext, Webcrawler, Excite and Altavista was precisely that it began concentrating on social connections on the web.
And insofar as non-search services - Google has Orkut, on Google Mail one could only get an account originally through an acquaintance, Google Earth has a Web 2.0 collaborative piece to highlight places in a local area, Google sponsors the Summer of Code and so forth. Facebook may be taking the social component even farther, but Google has never been just an icy monolith of sleek computers and dispassionate equations.
Re:Give Me Dispassionate Information Any Day (Score:3, Interesting)
If you rely on a Google for your knowledge, you get plenty of gossip, urban legends, ignorance etc, and worse you don't even know the people it's from, and whether there is any reason to trust them or not.
That's true enough if you're totally indiscriminate and don't use services such as Google Scholar. Let's say I need information on Iran.
First result: Wikipedia. I know it's pretty accurate if you avoid touchy topics. Since this is Iran, I'll poke around the citations for primary information but pass otherwise.
Second stop: CIA World Factbook. This is accurate. Surprisingly, despite your claim to the contrary, I do know who wrote this information and and how much I can trust it.
Third hit: New York Times coverage. Again, I know who it's from and about how much I can trust them (probably, but corroborate).
And that's just from the first few links of plain ol' Google.
antimatter in the mix (Score:5, Interesting)
Google appears to be the one company in this mix that seems to subscribe to the notion that a rising tide floats all boats. Look at what they are doing with Google Wave [google.com] as a fascinating example (innovative, open standards based, open source implementation).
Microsoft's world domination by operating system monopoly is over, they are a dead man walking.
FaceBook will integrate with Google Wave, or they will become irrelevant.
Blog engine makers will have an opportunity to see blogs on an equal footing with FaceBook, by integrating with Google Wave. Bloggers will have a chance to spark a conversation through their social network, as with FaceBook, but they will also have the chance to have that conversation grow beyond their circle of friends, as with a high profile blog today. As a participant in those conversations, your contribution today is normally "fire and forget" (I always wonder why people bother posting to the comments area of the major newspapers, where there comment is read only by them and one or two lunatics with an axe to grind). Tomorrow, with Google Wave, you can participate in conversations all over the internet, without the need to remember to go back to hundreds of places to check to see if anyone else was interested in what you said.
If they (or someone else) figure out how to build a decent set of filters and ratings into it, Google Wave might make Digg irrelevant.
Don't forget Advertisers! (Score:5, Interesting)
using Facebook in place of Google sounds like many steps back
The questions you ask your friends are going to be more limited. Feedback to advertisers in the form of data will also be more limited, therefore less valuable to advertisers.
You know what would be of *huge* value to advertisers? Social news techniques used *on* advertising. Hulu is in a great position for this. *Let* the users skip (or better yet, 40X fast-forward) the ads! If not that, then let users mod them up or down! Heck, why not tags, like "irrelevant" "obsolete" or "already own?" Advertisers would get immediate feedback on ad reception. Correlation to buying demographic buying habits would be easier to make. Decisions on where to put ad budget wouldn't have to be done at the huge granularity of a particular show or timeslot, but could be targeted directly at demographic cohorts.
Viewers would benefit, as ads would have to get better. Advertisers would benefit from the better, more watchable ads!
My vision of the Internet... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why not have both? (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with Zuckerberg's vision is that it only works when you have a sufficient number of friends who share your interests. When people don't organize themselves into mailing lists, forums, newsgroups, etc., but only have social connections, you end up having to know someone already into a particular hobby to find out any more about it. Word of mouth is great when it works but it's unreliable.
Re:Give Me Dispassionate Information Any Day (Score:3, Interesting)
"True Enough"
That's a title of the book by Farhad Manjoo
It is a human condition to search for the information that reaffirms a pre-established set of beliefs
(comes from the book) that reinforce our own opinions (like Slashdot).
Google weakness is their scope. When it comes to information, they are the GM of the 60's.
In house, vertical, total control.
Facebook banks on that a groups people that exchange information that they find _useful_.
Social networks should not be flat but holistic. They must grow withing their local contexts.
"True Enough"
Great book. I recommend it.
Re:antimatter in the mix (Score:3, Interesting)
A Third Way (Score:3, Interesting)
Instead of Facebook's community assistance, and Google's assistance from the cloud, a third way is Rbate's [rbate.com] model of assistance from professional helpers, which includes a search engine [rbate.com] that's dedicated to allowing people to find such helpers.
Helpers can not only include the usual forms of professional information, advice, and assistance (professional reviews, aggregators of consumer reviews, and full-service retailers), but consultants and recommendation engines that can offer more personalized service. Relying on reviews takes too much work to find and understand the information you're looking for, while retail service, which has often been pretty clueless, is further suffering due to competition from online and discount outlets.
If you pay these helpers for the help they give rather than the ads they expose or the sales they mediate (retailers & affiliates), you can make it easier for professional help to be free.
Eventually though, people be willing to pay fees for professional assistance for more products than just big ones like investment advice.
Re:antimatter in the mix (Score:3, Interesting)
but at the end of the day most users dont care about the technology behind the products that they use, only the direct utility value to them. the miracle of facebook (don't get me wrong, I barely use the damn thing) is that it taught people a new mode of communication that resonated well with them. more importantly, the developers of the service listened to the users and expanded it in ways that accelerated its growth. when the service first launched, it did not even support global group memberships (memberships in groups outside of your individual facebook 'site,' which was of course back when it was still a closed system).
wave is certainly cool but google knows very well that it will be the ability of the developers to find novel applications that everyday users will find fun and exciting to use; applications with strong network effects and possibly ones that do not compete directly with facebook. IMHO, that task (finding something the users will like and then getting them to use it in large numbers) is much more difficult than designing the middle-ware.